X-Cart Catalog .. Possibility of having multiple catalogs within one store?
 

Hi X-Cart,

This might be a slightly strange question, but advice on it is needed for our current project.

Currently, we have an supplier with many products with different price points and availablity depending on an specific region in the world. For contract purposes, we cannot sell X region within another region, so we need to be able to allow users to purchase from specific catalogs based on their location.

- The location discovery is already handled with our API integration with MaxMind (great partner!)

- The multi-catalogs is where we are hitting a problem. I realize this will require custom work, which isn't a worry, but we just want to see if anybody experienced something like this in the past.

Let me provide a few examples:

1. We sell 1,000 products .. Each catalog contains the EXACT same products, except with different languages and price points.

2. When a customer comes from the UK for example, we need the products and content on the page to pull from the UK catalog.

3. When a customer comes from the US for example, we need the products and content on the page to pull from the US catalog.

Same payment gateway (with exception of different currency is already handled via Braintree).

Any advice or thoughts would be great.

Thanks,
Ryan

Re: X-Cart Catalog .. Possibility of having multiple catalogs within one store?
 

I've resolved issue by our team completing custom development.

Re: X-Cart Catalog .. Possibility of having multiple catalogs within one store?
 

Tigershark,
Would you explain what your team did? Would be nice to know the solution you arrived at. And it would keep this thread from being useless. :-)

Re: X-Cart Catalog .. Possibility of having multiple catalogs within one store?
 

Hey Mike,

Sure, the solution we developed is actually quite simple, and any development team should be able to replicate it fairly easily.

When I first started thinking about this problem, I was thinking along the lines of Magento.. having to make a new store within a store, hours of complications, and BS .. but than I took some time and laid out exactly what we need.

- We need a way to show specific products based on different country supplier feeds.
- We need a way to show different pricing based on different country supplier feeds.

Our solution ended up being something that took only a weekend of development and testing to complete (doing some minor addons to it now).

This is what we did:

1. We realized that if we KNEW the customer's country, we could extrapolate this data into other areas of the system.. for example, similar to the Multi-Currency system that shows different currencies based on country, we wanted to apply similar logic to our product feed.

Currently, we using MaxMind for GeoIP2 API Integration to correctly identify a user's country = http://www.maxmind.com/en/country (its pretty cheap).

2. Next, once we had the customer's country, we needed to make the system show ONLY products available within this country. So we edited the Product Page and included a new area called "Country Availability". From here we listed all major territories such as: United States, Mexico, United Kingdom etc and made them checkboxes.

So we'd go to each product and select which countries we want this product to show for.

Example: If a customer comes from the United Kingdom and a product isn't checked for UK, than it will NOT show to the customer. Likewise if it IS checked it will display for the customer.

This simple mechanism allowed us to store multiple types of the SAME products in our store, but have the different language/priced variants show to ONLY the selected countries via the product page.

3. Once the country was selected, we simply added a new pricing field into the product page, for example: USD (box 1), GBP (box 2), and EURO (box 3). The multi-currency module already knows which currency belongs to which country, so we didn't need to make any adjustments there.

So we simply put in the different prices into the box knowing that when X customer visits us from X country, the correct product and correct price will NOW display.

and that's how we solved handling multiple catalogs of products to only show for specific selected countries with different price points.

Now that its setup.. it takes us 5 - 10 seconds to align each product. HOWEVER .. to make it really easy.. we just imported an CSV document with the changes in bulk and the entire system updated.. :)

Hope this helps,
Ryan

Re: X-Cart Catalog .. Possibility of having multiple catalogs within one store?
 

Ryan,

Thanks for the thorough explanation. I thought that something like thiswoulkd be more suitable than an entirely separate catalog. Sounds like your team took the best path.

Re: X-Cart Catalog .. Possibility of having multiple catalogs within one store?
 

No worries - glad to have been of help :)

Yea whenever I start a new product.. sometimes its good to take these "mental breaks" to sort of rewind and start from scratch.. sometimes solutions like this are result.. which end up saving so much more time doing it in a complicated fashion.

Thanks!
- Ryan