Messages

Hi Julie,

If KonaKart team decides to implements bundle support in future versions of product, I would advise to:

• make the bundle definition as easy as possible


• the bundle should have all characteristics of a product (prices, promotions, description, etc)


• allow a product to be part of any number of bundles or to be sold stand alone


• allow a bundle to contain any number of products, irrespective of their type


• when the user selects a bundle, the prices of individual product from the bundle should not be relevant and should not be displayed


• the cross-sell, up-sell, accessories and dependant products should be dynamically constructed by the system based on aggregation of the merchandise characteristics of each product


• the bundle should have a static description (like any product) and an dynamic description listing individual descriptions of the products from the bundle


• the shopping cart should clearly mark the bundle lines as opposed to product lines; this means that the user should readily see that a line on the shopping cart refers to a bundle

Now, from technical point of view, how KonaKart team decide to tackle this ... I can't really comment.
Anyway you are doing a excelent job so I am sure you will take the best decision.

Florin

hello,

RE bundles:

Bundling is an extremely important thing for marketing guys and therefore the mechanisms required to support it must be very flexible; one can dare to say that the differentiator between merchants is how they manage to bundle their goods.

The first approach (dependent products) it's suboptimal from flexibility point of view because:

• the number of prices attached to a product is limited 


• when you define a product you must anticipate if it will be part of a bundle and which one in order to set the price; usually you don't


• as the name implies, in my mind I see a dependency relationship when talking about "dependent products"; the name of the concept must have something to do with it  . However, bundling does not imply any dependency relationship between products, it is simply a trick to sell the goods.

Thanks,

Florin

[dependent products]

Hello,

Thank you for fast reply; I will start with the easy part:

1. dependent products: taking over your suggestion I guess I can define a custom product attribute as an indicator if the dependent product is mandatory to buy along with the initial selection.

2. bundles: I see bundles as a mix between categories and products.
More precisely, from admin point of view,

• the bundle should behave much like a product (i.e. same properties, definition flow, possibility to be included in a category, promotions, etc)


• but it can also contain other products, like a category can (i.e. one should use the same mechanisms that is implemented today for assigning products to category for assigning products to bundles).

From user point of view, the changes are:

• once a bundle is selected, the descriptions of all items in the bundle are visible in the bundle description but without price information for each item


• the shopping card item for the bundle should have the same characteristics as an item for products but will also contain subitems for each product part of the bundle; the price is listed only for the bundle

I think that most part of my expectations are really presentation issues which can be handled via changes in JSP files, what is really missing is datamodel support and admin flow to create bundles.

As an indication, in order to solve this problem without changes to KonaKart engine or datamodel, I was thinking to:

• define categories in admin app with special properties (maybe custom) so that they are not visible


• define ordinary products in admin app that contains the characterisitcs of the bundle (price, promotions, description, etc)


• link the previsously defined products and categories via some custome attributes


• change the presentation layer

The problem is that this approach is not natural for the admin and it is error prone.

Regards,

Florin

Hello,

I am playing around with KonaKart and I am fairly decided to use it in the next project but I have some questions related mainly to bundles:

Does KonaKart have support for bundles?

If not, is it possible to set a price to a category and get everything in it (this would be a "simulated bundle")?

I tried to configure dependent products and it worked OK in admin app; however, I can't really see any difference in user front end meaning that I expected that once I select a product the dependent ones are automatically put in the shopping cart or at least you should have a warning. How exactly works the "dependent product" feature?

Thank you in advance,

Florin

Dear all,

I am pushing an ecommerce arhitecture based on KonaKart and OpenCMS and I would like to know performance and sizing figures for installations of KonaKart.

Basically, I need to have 1,600 concurrent users and a latency below 3sec measured at front end servers (time measured from the moment tomcat receives the HTTP request up to the moment it sends out the HTTP response).

Can anyone share her/his experience from this point of view? what amount of RAM and CPU I have to plan for?

I guess any HW architecture and OS will do since I hope to roughly transform the figures for my architecture which is based on Itanium and Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition.

Thank you in advance,

Florin