New Client/Commerce Customer Feedback

[DesignzShop]

I had a local customer purchase 2 suites for his 2 domains yesterday. I got everything set up and was walking him through the cart process. I of course want to tailor the commerce app to flow as he expects. Please keep in mind this customer can barely turn his desktop on, what I hear from him is pretty much raw feedback from the simplest aspect/view.

The products he sells doesn't require someone to make a online purchase thus the checkout process should not be made available. It confuses the end user in thinking they can make a purchase. Let me give you a real life example or 2 here.

Site 1 sells used high performance drag racing parts, This particular customer is a well known NHRA/IHRA parts distribute and associates with the biggest names in drag racing on a daily basis. What he does for a living is purchase high performance used parts and re-sell then and ship them off to all over the world. He buys things rail cars, funny cars, chassis, basically anything related to top fuel. He needs his clients to see the products he offers but doesn't sell online. Shipping costs for 90 percent of his items can't be determined until the time of shipping itself also due to the nature of his products.

Site 2 This client owns a pinball machine business and sells mostly local and just wants his customers to see his inventory and call in to purchase one of his machines or to get service. This customer believes the best way to gain a customer wholly is to communicate directly for the sale service or repair of pinball machines. 

Both these sites are listed under my account also as I am authorized for his account. Please feel free staff to view the sites  to see them live.

My suggestion here is to allow a option to include the checkout button or not when creating the product. Using "0" wont work for price to rid yourself of the button. A customer may offer a "0" dollar product as I do at my theme site for product registrations. The most sensible option I can see is allow a option to remove the button for each individual product ad or all of them.

In short both of this client wanst to use commerce to display their inventory and take payment over the phone for sales or directly in house.

Thank You

Other than that he's been a customer of mine since 2009. He LOVES the software. It's easy for him to use he says for the little time he's been on it this morning. He's got a lot of products already listed too  My concern with moving any customers over to IPB has been ease of use and flow. If this client says it's working for him, I may even move more of my local customers over in the next year.. Great job IPB..

[DesignzShop]

One last suggestion - Sorry

Please consider making it so blocks can go above the menu in the sidebar and in the middle at the top. As it is now everything must go onto the bottom. This particular client wants to put a block above the sidemenu to display his hours, phone, and business address etc...

[Joel R]

I'm liking this post because those are really neat businesses that use IPS.  Would love to see them listed in the IPS 4 showcase with your themes 

[DesignzShop]

On 3/31/2017 at 11:02 PM, Joel R said:

I'm liking this post because those are really neat businesses that use IPS.  Would love to see them listed in the IPS 4 showcase with your themes 

He's just getting hemipartsking filled with stock now. Pinballpast is next on the list after he stocks hemipartsking. So pinball past has no product in it so far. It will very soon however. He uses the White Label theme of mine on hemipartsking and the dark force theme for pinball past

http://www.hemipartsking.com/
http://pinballpast.com/

[Aaron M]

It sounds like both of those use cases would be more applicable to something crafted in Pages? That way you could tailor it to function however you wanted.

If you were hellbent on using Commerce, my recommendation would be to edit that part of the template and basically just remove the checkout button and quick view checkout button. That way, they can't purchase what they can't add (and you can sell it out too because they wouldn't see it say "out of stock" if you removed that too)

[The Old Man]

Nice to see some real-life Commerce examples, DesignzShop! Thank you.

Basically he is using the sites to show a stock inventory which I suppose isn't what Commerce is intended for. I agree with Aaron, it sounds like Pages would be a more suitable solution for him. It does seems somewhat bizarre though that your client would have websites set up for online trading but he is missing out on the whole point of online sales, surely a wasted business opportunity that could otherwise grow and develop his business?