Inventory Showcase with no e-commerce
 

I have a client who likes the x-cart products management, newsletter tools as well as policy stuff but does not wish to sell online, just showcase their products. They are a wholesaler so no need to exchange money or show pricing. I think the admin is overkill for them. They simply want to add products and caregories with two photos each possibly three.

Any ideas how I can make this site a showcase for products and not an actual e-commerce site? Where do I start. No need for checkout, sumbmit order, log in, etc.. just manage products and add products and categories. I like the stats for these sections as well.

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Joe

I don't know how to do it, but I woul dlike the ability to.
 

I am in agreement. I would also like the ability.

The difference is that my client has some products that they want to sell and others that they just want to showcase. This could happen if we had the ability to display a product, but not display the "buy now" button or the price.

It could be another option to the "Availability" dropdown box located in the "Modify Product" page.

Seems the easiest thing would be to edit the product.tpl and products.tpl to remove the add to cart button if you didn't want to sell anything. If you wanted to just sell certain products you could add a new availability field to the products table of the database, and then add something like this to the templates.


Should be pretty easy to do. I could go more in depth if anyone is interested.

How will they get indication of interest in products from wholesalers?

Why not just make the wholesalers members and only display pricing to them?

How do they transact business now with these wholesalers and why wouldn't they want to allow them to purchase right through xcart? Even if it's on PO or non-credit card based transactions.

Seems like a complete waste of effort to direct them to a site, show them all the products and then not let them place an order.

If all they want is a showcase, just use Gallery or Joomla or some other CMS system.

Seems like such an antiquated way to do business.

Oh well.

reply
 

There are never more than one product and the products are never the same. Plus the machines are $200,000 so pricing is always negotiable. They simply want to show whats in stock this month, provide the details and get the inquiry. The company refurbishes machinery for the leather industry. BIG machines.

I am not familiar with the system you suggested but I will do some homework and see what I can learn. Thanks for your post.

ahhh... those are the kinds of details that help when posting.

Understood. Sounds like they could use a blog like wordpress, even. Gallery, is a photo gallery program. So they could have shots from multiple angles and make an "album" out of each product as it's available.

A content management program, like Joomla might be overkill.

I would say look at something simple, like Gallery or WordPress as the easiet solution for just showing off a product and having some descriptive text about the item.

Thank you
 

Thanks, I will look into these. I tried a few in my c-panel but way overkill.