[Zope-dev] the birth of ZCommerce

[Scott Robertson]

On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, Josh Zeidner wrote:

> >Accounting packages are just wierd. How companies use them are even
> >wierder. Getting a compnay (or their accoutants) to change accounting
> >systems (le alone learn any new software) is a lesson in futilalty.
> >Probally the best thing you can do is provide ways to export data, and 
> >pray.
> >In other words this shouldn't be made a priority, although it would be a
> >nice sell.
> 
>   Thats is why we should offer an API and let the developers "hook" in 
> whatever accounting software they want.
> 

>   Possibly NEITHER! (put that in your pipe and smoke it).  Maybe the 
> inventory info can come from our accounting system?  That would be a feature 
> not really offered by any existing commerce package- what most ecommerce 
> packages attempt to do is EVERYTHING.  What the aim of this project should 
> be is to offer a way to sell products that live in an existing system( such 
> as Quicken or SAP ) and allow the process of marketing/retail to be 
> automated through the net.  *Anything* that has to do with accounting should 
> be the domain of the accounting system.
> 

Most high end accounting packages would use a SQL backend, I would
presume. 

> >
> >My current line of thingking on e-commerece in Zope would be to provide a
> >series of components, not necesaryily an integradted store.
> 
>    This seems like the natural OpenSource/Zope way to do stuff.
> 

Well yeah, I like to take other peoples ideas and claim that they're my
own. That's a trick I learned from Paul :)

> 
> >* Some form of shopping cart object
> 
>    - you are correct sir
> 
> >* Inventory control objects that can categorize items for sale but can
> >   come from different datasources ZODB, SQL, etc...
> 
>    - you forgot the exterior accounting system.

It's been my experince that alot of companies will have some POS (That's
point of sales) system and then have some other accounting system say
MAS90, QuickBooks, or some retched little thing still running under dos.
What I was thinking was just a MarketItems object (to steal from EMarket)
that can be placed anywhere in the zope DB that provides a solid api for
listing, adding, and removing inventory items. It can then be inherited
from so that it can pull from a SQL db, use MS Com to talk to Quicken if
possible, or pull information our of the stack of papers on my desk.


> 
> >* Credit Card Processor object *cough Wampum Generator cough cough*
> >* And a way to do reporting (This makes my head hurt)
> 
>    - this could be taken care of by the accounting software.
>
There again, not all accounting packages process credit cards. If you
check out the Wampum Generator (excuse me while I pat myself on the back) 
at www.zope.org/Download/Contrib you'll find a CyberCash connector that I
just uploaded yesterday for Zope. Of course it dosen't compile under
Windows yet, I don't have access to a windows compiler.


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