Website options

Hi all,

How useful is the website for an ecommerce platform?

I have a couple of businesses and I would like to be able to publish different websites for them.

One is a distributor of PPE and industrial products for healthcare, heavy industry and food service. Another sells branded merchandise, and those products require some specific pricing functions.

For the distribution site, it just needs to be a smart catalogue. I want users to be able to filter and sort the options they are looking for by multiple product attributes.

For the merchandise site, this is almost all B2B and there are three parts to the challenge.

First, the products have price tiers. There is a standard product format in the promotional industry here in Australia, which achieves the price tiering with data pairs like “price1” “vol1” and so on. Very straight forward. I want to be able to upload products with those attributes and create pricing tables on the product display, and to have the system dynamically apply the right price depending on the user’s input.

Second, add-on products for decoration (screen print, pad print, embroidery, laser engraving, etc). These have setup costs and also volume price tiers like the “base products”. They should be “applied” to a base product, not bought in their own right. There are some variables here, such as “number of colours” and “print size” in screen print. I would make separate products of each of these, “1 colour screen print, small” a separate add-on product altogether from “3 colour screen print, medium”, and so on. These would then be grouped for display as a table in the product details, with all the screen print options as one table, all the embroidery options as a separate table, and so on.

Third, have the decorations apply to multiple products. E.g. client buys 100 each of 5 different kinds of t-shirt and gets them all embroidered, so the total price for embroidery should be the 500 volume tier, and there should be just one setup fee.

This is a small project looking for the right platform. I am investigating whether this is feasible in WooCommerce (and I suspect it is not a very good fit) and PrestaShop as my two favourite platforms because I can self-host. If it can be done with ERPNext I will be even happier, because I intend to roll the platform out to the whole enterprise, making use of warehousing, inventory, accounting, HR, and so on.