Just quoting on an interesting project to develop a module that allows the shop owner to sell firearms. I am unaware of countries that allow the sale of firearms (other than the US) and I am not from the US so have no real idea how it works, so I’ll try to keep this post fairly generic!
From what I gather, US residents are able to purchase firearms from websites. The website ship the firearm to a dealer. The buyer then goes to the dealer (presumably with his ID and other licenses as required), and picks up the firearm (or gets told to “go away” if the ID etc is not correct). I hope my understanding is just about correct!
So, how to do this in osCommerce?
Please note all of the below points are theoretical, so in practice may prove entirely unsuitable.
1. We need to be able to insert Dealers and link them to multiple zipcodes. An admin section (something like the manufacturers page in admin) would be required. Name, address, zips covered etc etc. This would need two tables; dealers and dealers_to_zipcodes
2. A mechanism to determine whether a product is a firearm or not. This is quite straightforward and I would base the code on part of the HAZMAT module I made for a previous client.
3. In the checkout, a way for the customer to choose the dealer that is local to him – this would be based on a dropdown populated by the dealers that have the customers zipcode as one of their covered “area”.
Note that this would only be needed if the order did in fact contain firearms. If the order was for accessories only, then obviously the customer gets delivery to his home address.
This should then show the dealers details at the checkout_confirmation stage, and should show the chosen dealer on the order summary (for the shop owner to arrange delivery thereof). Also in the order history for the customer – could even have it linked to Google Maps so that the customer can have a print out of the map how to find the dealer – but that is a cherry on the cake and is not part of the core code I am thinking of.
4. If the order is “mixed”, that is both firearms and accessories, then we need to split the order up into those bits being delivered to the customers house and those bits being delivered to the chosen dealer. This could be problematic, I’m still thinking on this. An easier alternative is to simply not allow mixed orders – easy as 123, but could prove difficult for clients to accept.
All in all, it would be a great project to work on. I’ve quoted and will see what happens.
Gary:
For #4, could each product have a “class” (firearms, holster, etc), that could be carried along with the order? Then on the confirmation screen and checkout process, split the order up by the “class”, showing the shipping and total of accessories and showing the firearms section by itself on the confirmation screen and doing the order split in the checkout_process.
This was just off the top of my head and totally stream of consciousness. Hope it gives you an idea or two.
John
Hi John – nice idea. I’ll see if I can do something like that (assuming I get the contract!) lol
Better yet, just ship the whole order to the dealer, if it’s mixed. They’re going to have to go there anyway.
Vince – that makes perfect sense. But isn’t what the client wanted. Anyway, this job never went ahead, so kind of forgot about it.