PrestaShop recommended to sell customized products?

[peter_h1969]

Dear community,

 

currently I am evaluating several webshops that could form the basis for our new webshop. We run a photographer website to present the images of photo shootings in customer-specific image galleries that are only accessible to the customer or to those authorized by the customer.

 

We want to add webshop functionality to the existing image gallery that has been created as a Joomla component. We mainly sell customized products based on the images of the photo shootings. We have simple products, where there is a 1:1 mapping between selected product and image (e.g. order a 13x18 cm picture of a photography). We also have complex products requiring a number of images and further attributes like text, font, position, design style (e.g. order a birthday card with certain text to be arranged around some selected images). Finally, we sell sets of products which comprise a number of simple and/or complex products.

 

We plan to have a shopping cart that collects all the purchased items, i.e. the items that are stated on the invoice, like sets and products. The shopping cart does not store the required attributes to customize a product. Therefore we need a kind of 'customization cart' where all the products are stored that require attention from the customer before the order can be processed, i.e. all the products where the selection of images or other attributes is still required. We need this separation, as we sell already products in advance together with the photo session. In such a case, it is required that the customer does not get confronted with a shopping cart showing prices - it is only required to present a list which products require image selection for free due upfront payment.

 

Do you have any suggestions whether PrestaShop would be a good starting point having these requirements in mind? If yes, which existing modules would you suggest to use and which parts should be created from scratch?

 

Thank you very much for your support.

 

Best regards,

Peter

 

[FullCircles]

From the sounds of it, getting that working will likely involve a lot of bespoke work, I've never seen a module that would allow after purchase modifications of products in a way that would work how you want

 

Just to clarify for myself and others, with the ones where they've pre-paid at the photo session, am I right in assuming that when they get sent to the store, the product would have a list of custom images based on their photo session, for them to select from, then embed text etc etc?

 

So essentially every product like that would need to be added unique to the customer?

 

I'm currently assuming that the complex products will end up similar to how a lot of custom T-shirt sites end up, like this one for example

I haven't found one for prestashop so far, but someone else might hopefully be able to point you to one, not sure what to search for in truth, don't know of a set name for that kind of module.

 

I know that it's possible to code up such a module for prestashop anyhow, but it'll be a fair bit of work, getting them working the same on all varieties of browsers and mobile devices is the tricky bit, but one that's necessary so that what the customer saw on their screen doesn't differ too much from the finished product

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What I'd focus on is finding a system that can handle that, including position of text or subimages on images and whatnot as your base search. It'll save you a fair bit of work.

Having to handle the unique products and customers getting provided with prepaid orders is something that you'd likely need to have done bespoke no matter the system

[peter_h1969]

[FullCircle] Just to clarify for myself and others, with the ones where they've pre-paid at the photo session, am I right in assuming that when they get sent to the store, the product would have a list of custom images based on their photo session, for them to select from, then embed text etc etc?

 

Yes, you are right. This would be the approach.

 

[FullCircle] So essentially every product like that would need to be added unique to the customer?

 

Under my terminology, a product is an item that may be added to a shopping cart. A product itself is ***not*** unique to a certain customer, as it may be purchased by any customer. The idea behin is that a user may purchase a product like purchasing a voucher which entitles the customer to receive a customized product after the customer has provided all necessary information that allows us to produce the product.

 

Consequently, in the first stage of the shopping process, I am in the need for a kind of "conventional" webshop where products can be added to a shopping cart. We have products with several properties that need already to be defined when putting the product into the shopping cart, but these are decisions based on a few selection lists, like color type of an image (color, black/white, sepia) or size (various sizes from 10x15 cm to 60x90 cm). However, the product selection does ***not*** involve the customization, i.e. the selection of images used to manufacture the purchased product and also not texts and other customer-specific definitions relevant for the manufacturing process.

 

[FullCircle] I'm currently assuming that the complex products will end up similar to how a lot of custom T-shirt sites end up, like this one for example

 

Your provided link to a custom T-shirt site would be one example of how customization of products could be implemented. However, in our webshop we would like to split the purchase process from the customization process. Clearly, if a customer adds a product to the shopping cart, he should be able to customize it immediately. But there is no requirement to do this customization before finalizing the purchase process.

 

Furthermore, at first, I have no requirements for a fully flexible customization of products with a kind of editor. Instead, we would like to work with predefined product templates, e.g. different variants of birthday cards or whatsoever. The customer selects one style based on an image of this product style and then selects the required amount of images from his photo shooting and enters a text into a textbox. Thus, there is no need for a product editor to fully design the product. In a later stage, I would like to have such an editor, but as an additional option, not as a replacement. We assume that most of the customer will take our styles and benefit from an easy assembly of images and provided texts.

 

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I understand that such an approach requires quite a lot of customization of a webshop. Right now, I would highly appreciate if someone could give me a hint for a good starting point to realize such a functionality. Probably worth noticing is that we already have an image gallery realized as a Joomla component where the customers may browse through the images of their resepctive photo shootings. This needs to be extended towards webshop functionality as described. However, I would like to integrate with an existing webshop.

 

Any suggestions?

[FullCircles]

It's a tricky one, must admit. None of the standard ecommerce platforms I'm familiar with have all, or even most of the functionality needed to set that up.

 

Hopefully someone else will know one that I don't, which does offer some of it built in

 

Failing that, I'd say your best bet might just be to have a look at some platforms and pick on based on the general admin and smoothness of the store, because it does look like you'd need to have most of that bit custom made.

 

So essentially just pick one that you like and that you can get a reasonable quote for the custom work, I'd say

[peter_h1969]

Thank you very much for your comments.

 

Hints are very welcome which shop systems are designed in a way that they are easily extendable.

[FullCircles]

Varies really.. I used to use a lot of CubeCart back in the day, which was very easy to modify.. this was for versions 3 and 4 though, 5 is much less friendly to make bespoke changes to, so we drifted away from it. Opencart was (perhaps still is) set up in a similar fashion to cubecart

 

Prestashop is certainly one of the better ones I've worked with, the main draw I'd say is that you can make all your work act as extensions to the core code, so that future updates don't override them, a lot of the other carts don't handle that anywhere near as smoothly

 

Magento is one that's usually thrown about a lot, but it's a very tricky system to work with without training, so a lot of the bespoke work seems to cost an arm and a leg, I'm not a huge fan really, I consider it more viable for large businesses that have a budget to get the entire system custom made to their specifications

 

I'd personally make sure to never go near anything wordpress, though I do know of a few sites that use ecommerce plugins with that. It's as very popular target with hackers, for whatever reason, always seen that as a big downside

 

Those are about the only ones I've had much experience with personally, so couldn't really say much about any of the others