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Paradroid

Paradroid

Hi,

 

I'm on a hunt for a new/better online shop system and came across PrestaShop. I was a bit surprised to be thrown a 70MB installation file after just a few clicks and without even verifying my eMail address, but that's OK - probably a strategy to increase the "new shop every 4 minutes"-statistics?

Anyway, after watching a few videos and reading the brochure, I have a couple of detail questions that I'd like to hear some opinions on from actual users and/or developers. Our current shop is a heavily customized version of Contao+Isotope, but it's slow as hell, and it's getting slower with every product added. Since the age of this installation is approaching 9 years and updates are "hard to impossible" due to our custom code, I'd like to change to something new.

The business is small - under 500k EUR revenue per year, and there's hardly a year where we crack the 4000-orders-per-year mark, with very little outlook on growth (maybe tiny organic growth, but nothing outrageous). We currently live with wire transfer and PayPal as payment options, but adding Stripe would also be nice. Here's a first key requirement: The PayPal fees must be shown to the customer, and added to the final amount before sending the customer to the PP page. I'm aware that PP does not like surcharging, but I don't care - I have been doing this for years, and it's my way of being honest to the customer: He shall have an advantage when I have one, and if I pay nothing for an incoming wire transfer, the customer shall pay less. Is it possible to configure adding a percentage to the final amount if the customer uses PayPal?

Next is taxes: We're in Germany, but sell a lot to non-German customers. EU VAT is different for all EU countries, and the shop needs to adjust the VAT rate based on where the customer is located, and of course completely deduct the VAT if a shipment is going outside the EU. Is this native to Prestashop, or do I have to enter all tax rates manually?

Shipping methods: Our current shop system only looks at the weight of a parcel. However, we have very light-weight products that take huge volume, and these are particularly expensive to ship to the US, as we have to pay "volume weight" with UPS. Is it possible to calculate shipping cost based on volume *and* weight in Prestashop? We currently work around this limitation in our shop by entering the volume weight of that big-light product as a high kg-weight and I could do the same in Prestashop, but it would be nice to have a more sophisticated method.

Next one is tricky: Restricted sales. We deal with low-volume and limited-availability goods. Our shop implements a number of restrictions, such as "maximum qty per product and customer" and "only sell product A if product B is also in the shopping cart". The latter is especially tricky if product A shall be bought after product B has already been shipped - our current customization allows logged-in-users to do that, as the cart verification will look at all past orders of the customer and allow the "restricted product A" if "product B" has been found in past orders. Is such a module available for Prestashop?

Download-product and updates: We also have download products, and these are updated frequently. However, there is a limited free update period, in our case of one year, then the customer needs to buy a new copy of the download product. How are updates handled for download-products within Prestashop?

Variable pricing: Some of our products have a variable pricing option, called "pay what you want". I configure a minimum and a recommended price, and the customer can choose anywhere between the minimum price and an astronomically-high price. Is such a module available for Prestashop?

Practical implementation: Our invoicing and shipping systems are separate from the online shop. I don't want to change this, as the invoicing system will auto-generate all numbers for our taxes, and it also talks to our self-developed shipping system, which comes with lots of photo documentation. The documentation includes all data of the order, such as address, item list, packing photos and weight changes down to 0.1g while packing the parcel. This shipping documentation has been helpful in finding small items that customers claimed to not have in their parcel, and I'd like to make that automatically available to customers if they view their order history. So the practical question would be: Is there an "order history" panel for customers where I can upload a PDF for every order, ideally with a script?

Last not least, I need to have the order data in some easily-parsable form. I have seen that I can export invoices as PDF, but is it also possible to have the invoice data as CSV? That's the current way that my invoicing system will generate invoices and shipping instructions from shop data.

 

I'm sure I'll have more questions, but this posting is already long enough. If you're answering, please indicate if you're a user or a developer (or both?), which will make it easier for me to understand your points.

 

Greetings from Germany,

Jens

 

Paradroid

Paradroid

Hi,

 

I'm on a hunt for a new/better online shop system and came across PrestaShop. I was a bit surprised to be thrown a 70MB installation file after just a few clicks and without even verifying my eMail address, but that's OK - probably a strategy to increase the "new shop every 4 minutes"-statistics?

Anyway, after watching a few videos and reading the brochure, I have a couple of detail questions that I'd like to hear some opinions on from actual users and/or developers. Our current shop is a heavily customized version of Contao+Isotope, but it's slow as hell, and it's getting slower with every product added. Since the age of this installation is approaching 9 years and updates are "hard to impossible" due to our custom code, I'd like to change to something new.

The business is small - under 500k EUR revenue per year, and there's hardly a year where we crack the 4000-orders-per-year mark, with very little outlook on growth (maybe tiny organic growth, but nothing outrageous). Wen currently live with wire transfer and PayPal as payment options, but adding Stripe would also be nice. Here's a first key requirement: The PayPal fees must be shown to the customer, and added to the final amount before sending the customer to the PP page. I'm aware that PP does not like surcharging, but I don't care - I have been doing this for years, and it's my way of being honest to the customer: He shall have an advantage when I have one, and if I pay nothing for an incoming wire transfer, the customer shall pay less. Is it possible to configure adding a percentage to the final amount if the customer uses PayPal?

Next is taxes: We're in Germany, but sell a lot to non-German customers. EU VAT is different for all EU countries, and the shop needs to adjust the VAT rate based on where the customer is located, and of course completely deduct the VAT if a shipment is going outside the EU. Is this native to Prestashop, or do I have to enter all tax rates manually?

Shipping methods: Our current shop system only looks at the weight of a parcel. However, we have very light-weight products that take huge volume, and these are particularly expensive to ship to the US, as we have to pay "volume weight" with UPS. Is it possible to calculate shipping cost based on volume *and* weight in Prestashop? We currently work around this limitation in our shop by entering the volume weight of that big-light product as a high kg-weight and I could do the same in Prestashop, but it would be nice to have a more sophisticated method.

Next one is tricky: Restricted sales. We deal with low-volume and limited-availability goods. Our shop implements a number of restrictions, such as "maximum qty per product and customer" and "only sell product A if product B is also in the shopping cart". The latter is especially tricky if product A shall be bought after product B has already been shipped - our current customization allows logged-in-users to do that, as the cart verification will look at all past orders of the customer and allow the "restricted product A" if "product B" has been found in past orders. Is such a module available for Prestashop?

Download-product and updates: We also have download products, and these are updated frequently. However, there is a limited free update period, in our case of one year, then the customer needs to buy a new copy of the download product. How are updates handled for download-products within Prestashop?

Variable pricing: Some of our products have a variable pricing option, called "pay what you want". I configure a minimum and a recommended price, and the customer can choose anywhere between the minimum price and an astronomically-high price. Is such a module available for Prestashop?

Practical implementation: Our invoicing and shipping systems are separate from the online shop. I don't want to change this, as the invoicing system will auto-generate all numbers for our taxes, and it also talks to our self-developed shipping system, which comes with lots of photo documentation. The documentation includes all data of the order, such as address, item list, packing photos and weight changes down to 0.1g while packing the parcel. This shipping documentation has been helpful in finding small items that customers claimed to not have in their parcel, and I'd like to make that automatically available to customers if they view their order history. So the practical question would be: Is there an "order history" panel for customers where I can upload a PDF for every order, ideally with a script?

Last not least, I need to have the order data in some easily-parsable form. I have seen that I can export invoices as PDF, but is it also possible to have the invoice data as CSV? That's the current way that my invoicing system will generate invoices and shipping instructions from shop data.

 

I'm sure I'll have more questions, but this posting is already long enough. If you're answering, please indicate if you're a user or a developer (or both?), which will make it easier for me to understand your points.

 

Greetings from Germany,

Jens

 

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