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E-commerce with eZ: enhanced features are not open source?

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A Buendia

Sunday 22 January 2006 7:58:15 pm

I am evaluating eZ publish for an e-commerce web application which should have typical features of a web shop, such as:

- Presenting products at a customised level
- Shipping modules
- Payment modules
- Order tracing system

eZ publish does include an integrated commerce system named WebShop (or eZ shop?). Moreover, according to ez.no (http://ez.no/products/ez_publish_cms/info/e_commerce_functionality), the e-commerce functionality includes a wide range of simple web shops to enterprise b2b.

The problem is that, after installing the system, I cannot see these advanced features as argued in the introducing the e-commerce system. There is this WebShop tab with some basic functionalities which do not include, say, an order tracing system. I cannot even find out how is it possible to ask the customer to register before putting an order. I understand that the advanced features mentioned in the website is marked as 'possibilities', meaning they are available 'potentially'. But, well, any advance feature is 'potentially' available to any basic system!

On the other hand, in Customers > References > E-Commerce, you can find some e-commerce applications with rich features. The questions are:

- Were the referenced websites made by WebShop?
- If yes
- how easy (or hard) is it to make the referenced e-commerce websites using the WebShop feature?
- Are the advanced features available as open source extensions, or are they secret money-makers?
- If no, I guess the arguments regarding creating enterprise websites by eZ should be modified.

Siw Helen Thorslund

Monday 23 January 2006 5:57:01 am

As you are experiencing, eZ publish basic installation contains only some of the functionality described here: http://ez.no/products/ez_publish_cms/info/e_commerce_functionality

You will have to customize the shop to be able to have all this functionality.

Ref this description of Enterprise web shop:
"Build integrated solutions with custom product sheets, back-end systems, payment gateways and hundreds of thousands of products. "

You can do this customizations yourself, or you can hire someone to do this for you. For this I would recommend one of the eZ publish solution partnes. In this way you will be sure that you will get qualified help.

You also had the following question:
"Are the advanced features available as open source extensions, or are they secret money-makers?"

We are currently working on a module for eZ publish that will be more of an out-of-the-box eZ publish shop. We have worked with some other companies with lots of e-commerce experience in getting down to what should be standard in this module.

You can contact us in VZT ( http://ez.no/partner/worldwide_ez_publish_partners/vzt ) for any further information abot these features.

To show you more about how we are planning the shop, you can take a look here: http://vzt.no/kunder/ehandel
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