Newegg-like Commerce Interface possible?
Development and Programming
I don’t know about you all, but I love Newegg’s shopping system - specifically, their guided/advanced/power search. Narrowing down products based on product attributes makes shopping so much more… logical! I mean, who hasn’t done something like this and wondered why all stores weren’t like this:
“Let’s see, I want a laptop, with a good-sized (not huge, but not too tiny) screen, so let’s get a 12.1” - 14.1” screen. Now, I do want a good processor, so let’s limit it to a Core 2 Duo - oh, and yes, it should be widescreen, with the highest resolution I can get… looks like that’s 1440x900. Ok, there’s lappys from Lenovo, Asus, and Toshiba that match… I’ll go for a Lenovo - I hear they’re pretty good. Ahh, memory sizes… 2Gb, please! Ah - the ThinkPad T61 matches my parameters. Hmm… I wonder what other laptops on the market match as well… let’s compare. I’ll just remove “Lenovo” from the list of my requirements… ah, there. Now I can compare a few products and see which one seems best to me. I love Newegg!”
Is there a way to do this type of structure for the Simply Commerce module’s products, as well as have this kind of interface to narrow results down progressively?
Hi there Michael,
If by the structure you mean that you start with say computers and then choose a price range and then a type etc then all of this could probably (I think) be achieved with clever usage of categories and perhaps the Tag module.
Categories could definitely do it although I think you are going to need a few of them and a clever way of showing them. A little advanced really but could be done I reckon with a lot of planning before hand.
Best wishes,
Mark
Michael,
The Simple Commerce module doesn’t much care how you organize your entries. It simply creates PayPal shopping cart links for entries with a valid product data in the DB.
So if you chose to organize those entries using multiple category assignments or multiple weblogs, or whatever you wish you are welcome to do so.
I think this is more a general EE development question. Have you looked over the various choices for how you can use Weblogs and Categories to organize your data?
Jamie
Michael, Have you looked over the various choices for how you can use Weblogs and Categories to organize your data?
Yes, I have. I’m gearing up for building my first EE site, and in the process have been reading through an extensive tutorial and various other guides. By now, I feel that I’ve got the gist for how to do the basic stuff, as well as a bit beyond that. But I haven’t read about all the tags yet - only the ones encountered in the resources above - so I don’t have a thorough mental grasp on how everything can plug in and link together. So I figured I’d ask you guys. 😊
Seems to me that EE could relatively easily handle containing all the various product properties and information, either in various weblogs with custom fields (ok, lots of various weblogs, simply teeming with oodles of custom fields), or in extensive categories and subcategories (seems to me that using categories would be best). But I’m not as sure if there would be a way to list all that information Newegg-like. If one is in a category of “CPUs”, can one display an organized list of all the other categories belonging to the weblog entries under that “CPU” category? I know Mark mentioned the Tag module…