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stevejebson 
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Joined: 28-October-2010 Location: Dorking Status: Offline Points: 0 |
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 Topic: Additional currencyPosted: 28-October-2010 at 11:19am |
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Hi,
Seriously looking at switching to PC now, just need to know if it's possible to have an additional Price for Euro for both Retail and Wholesale. We're UK based and trade mostly in europe as well as the uk but have different prices. We also switch product descriptions based on language, i.e French, Italian & English.
On current site we just have a couple of flag icons that store cookie info and then display product description and price depending on cookie setting.
can we do this out of the box or could we customise fairly easily ?
thanks
Steve
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Greg Dinger
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Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238 |
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Posted: 28-October-2010 at 12:47pm |
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That's a tough one Steve. Out of the box, you can only have one currency and one language. The effort needed to do what you are asking would likely be surpassed greatly by the easier alternative - just having one store in Pounds, and one in Euros. You may be able to use Google's translation service for multile language choices, if that seems workable.
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stevejebson
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Posted: 29-October-2010 at 4:36am |
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Ideally would not want to use the translation service as we have all our product descriptions translated locally so would prefer to have custom fields to hold the Italian/French versions.
The only problem i can see with multiple sites for euro/sterling is the initial cost i.e. license fee, especially if we go with the BTO. Still not sure if we will need that or not... So this is gonna be tricky, 'cos i can't see the source and work out if i can fiddle, I'm a programmer by trade, more asp than .net, and i've looked at a lot of carts and this ticks so many boxes for me.... decisions, decisions !! |
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Greg Dinger
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Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238 |
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Posted: 29-October-2010 at 9:51am |
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Here's the issue Steve. There are 3 languages files in the system, two for the front end and one for the admin. Those files contain tokens such as this one:
dictLanguage.Add "english_advSrca_1", "Search our product catalog"
Clearly those can be translated. Not a big deal. But there is no built-in support for flipping "english" to "french", based on some switch setting. There is simply a point in the "start session" module that does this:
session("language")=Cstr("english") So the first thing you have to do is to esablish logic to identify language preference and set that value. I have never gone down this road, so I don't know where the gaps are exactly. But I do know there are points, particularly (but not exclusively) in the admin, where there are strings of text that don't take their input from these languages files and would therefore have to be coded on a page-by-page basis. (Future upgrade maintenance alert!)
There are also a couple common error message files, like msg.asp, that have strings of text. Again, one would do something to detect language preference and alter these scripts to somehow work in a multi-language environment. (msg.asp is called from all over the place - lot's of difficult testing required after doing this because this is typically sending errors to the screen where something has gone wrong, thus you are looking for ways to create problems in order to force the necessary tests to take place.)
If the above was all that had to be dealt with, that might be easy - or at least doable. But it is not. The tough part is that there is only one set of fields in database tables such as the category and product tables. All of those product and category names, short descriptions, long descriptions, and so on - those are there in one language alone, and would therefore have to be duplicated to contain individually translated copies of each field. And this is where it really gets muddy. You start down this path, and you end up with a store that cannot realistically receive upgrades because the breadth of the changes are going to be so wide, once you are done you won't want to migrate the changes to a new version. It is going to cost a fortune.
So when you push back on the basis of cost of extra licenses (even BTO), that is NOTHING compared to the vortex you will enter when you start to alter the system for multi-language support. I bid a project for a Canadian shop that required French/English and the price was around $20k if I recall.
ProductCart is awesome. Look at the variety of stores in www.greatonlinestores.com. We're able to make it stand on its head, literally. But trying to do the above would make my head explode. It would be so much work. Rolling out multiple stores would be SO much easier, and SO much less expensive - both inititially as well as in the future.
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stevejebson
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Posted: 29-October-2010 at 10:03am |
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Thanks for the thoughtful and comprehensive reply. I'm pretty sure we are gonna go down the PC route and i just know i'm gonna see what i can do, won't be able to help myself ;-) I won't be looking for complete language support, just need to display product descriptions in french/italian which is why i was thinking of custom product fields and then displaying those or overwriting original description with custom field version. Same thing possibly with the Euro price.
I'll let you know as soon as i fail ;-)
Steve
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stevejebson
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Posted: 29-October-2010 at 10:03am |
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oh, and all the admin will be in english
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Greg Dinger
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Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238 |
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Posted: 29-October-2010 at 10:12am |
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I don't want you to fail, I just want you to recognize what a challenge this is. Not only are you confronted with adding new fields for the product names and descriptions (that alone is not that tragic an effort), then you have to look beyond the product pages where that gets displayed. There are a number of pages in the shopping section that will need to be dealt with, plus the saved cart and view cart pages, then go have a look at the checkout process. With that done, do you also have to deal with the e-mails that are sent, because there you go diving deeper.
Give me a shout over at my site directly if you want to talk about hosting, assistance, etc.
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netprofits
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Joined: 05-January-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 22 |
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Posted: 29-October-2010 at 10:31am |
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Hi Steve,
I have thought through this before and here are the issues/ideas I found:
1. Product Cart has three main “languages” files, one for the main site, one for the one-page checkout and one for shipping. The main file is included on every page of the front end of the site. It includes 100s of text labels in English. In order to use a different language, someone (the merchant) would need to duplicate all of those labels, change the variable names from English to the new language and then translate all of the labels to that language. All of the labels for all languages would need to be included in this same file which would get quite large. Fortunately it is processed on the server so it is pretty quick but the file will increase in size with each new language. I would recommend customizing this as well so that the dictionary only loads the elements for the language specified. 2. The template (header/footer) files will need to NOT use any language specific text, i.e. all text such as navigation links, titles, section headings, etc. would need to be added to the languages file. 3. PC uses multiple button images/icons throughout the site. These are only defined in one place, i.e. using one language. Different sets of images would need to be loaded/displayed based on the selected language. 4. The email content sent to customers when orders are placed is only defined for one language. There would need to be a way to edit those emails for each language and the email sending routines would need to select the correct language. 5. All categories and products are defined in only one language. Our initial thoughts would be: The product categories navigation on the site would need to be customized to only show product subcategories under the main category for the selected language. 6. Content Pages: Merchant would need to create a language specific content page for each page of content. We'd need to designate which language the page links to and then only show content pages for the selected language in the navigation. 7. Biggest issues are how to handle multiple currency formats, weights (lbs vs. kilo), etc. by country.
Hope that sheds some more light on the subject.
As Greg mentioned, in the end, multiple sites is probably the quickest and least expensive route especially when considering upgrades.
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Greg Dinger
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Joined: 23-September-2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 238 |
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Posted: 29-October-2010 at 10:48am |
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Dan is precisely correct on this - and I didn't even think about the buttons, the content pages, the e-mail message settings in the admin, and so on. You can see why I raise the red flags on this - it's almost impossible to do it well, and to end up with anything that can be managed in terms of installing future upgrades.
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