Need help on a strange shop

[PaulDRP]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working on my first Virtuemart shop and its a doozy.

I'm not a programmer and have 0.5% experience with php.

I've managed to get most of it working, most of the time through sheer luck but now I've run into some issues where I could really use some help.

The shop needs to have 3 "routes" so to speak, there's the route for a private customer who orders from somewhere thats not the USA. There's a business route where a company can fill in a contactform and request a custom price application.
Finally there's the USA only route, as the name suggests its for USA customers only and has a fixed price.

Now this way of doing things has been making working on this shop a frustrating experience.

I'm hoping the good people on this forum might be able to help me out with some problems I've been having.

1 - When I click the link for the USA Only route the currency has to automatically switch from Euro's to Dollars. My cliënt does not want to use the currency switch.
I've kinda fixed this by styling the currency switch to look like a regular button and removing Euro as an option. Then I hid the dropdown list and changed the button so it re-directs to the USA category page.

The problem with this is it changes the entire shop to dollars, something my client is not going to like. So I need a way to maybe duplicate this currency switch but change it around so it changes the shop back to Euro's and re-directs to the private category page.

Anybody have any idea about how I might get this to work?

2 - When a customer has selected the business route and filled in the contactform he gets acces to the business category page. I need a way to password protect this category page.
Using the joomla login and register system is not an option, the client does not want people to register before using the shop so it needs to be password only.

3 - The shipment costs for the products need to be additive, what I mean by that is for example: One bag costs 6.00 and 2.20 to deliver so the price will be 8.20. When someone wants say three bags the shipment costs also get tripled.
I cant add the shipment costs to the product itself because there are different shipping methods and they dont all cost the same.

4- The cliënt wants to show the shipment costs in the basket plugin on the product category page. This means the client wants people to first select their country before going into the shop. Only the country, nothing else.
The way I have it now is by using a pop-up showing all the shipment costs but the prices are hard coded in the category default.php. This means this list also shows up in the USA category page and cant be changed by the cliënt himself the client does not want this. Adding a simple page showing all the costs is also not an option.

5- The cliënt wants a way to check if the user has filled in a correct postal code and VAT-number. Is there a way to do this?

Any help will be very much appreciated, I've go the feeling some of these things are a bit out of the ordinary for a webshop so I've got my fingers crossed that there is a way to get these things to work.

[Milbo]

#1
I am sorry, but maybe you should explain first what you customer want todo. Why makes a difference for people within usa and outside usa, but want to use euro? There are free plugins to use the ip of a user to automatically set the correct currency.

#2
This request is quite absurd. not to say unprofessional bullshit :-). a come on really, all B2B people should use the same password? They are all honest, no one gives it away?They must fill out a form, but not register? This is like driving on a highway 20 miles per hour.

#3
looks like you have a completly wrong understanding of the shipment. You can have as many rates as you need, so you must create different shipmentmethods for different weights.

#4 Before starting to hack, you should ask first. What you want todo is almost completly native. The normal cart checkout process let oyu enter FIRST the address to display the correct shipment. Instead of bugging your customers, I think it is better to use the geolocator plugin.

#5 Maybe your client just wants this? http://extensions.virtuemart.net/extensions-virtuemart-2/eu-vat-checker-detail

[PaulDRP]

Thanks for your reply Milbo!

#1
I am sorry, but maybe you should explain first what you customer want todo. Why makes a difference for people within usa and outside usa, but want to use euro? There are free plugins to use the ip of a user to automatically set the correct currency.

According to the client this has something to do with being able to sell to the USA at a discount so the price does not match exactly when converted from Euro's (I think, I forget the details) and the shop was designed to work this way.
It was designed by someone other than me (before it was decided we would use Virtuemart) and they are quite adamant the design should stay the same, even if it makes less sense.

I'm not shure a plugin would work, the shop is only allowed to have two currency's Euro's and Dollars so it cant be the case that someone from say Canada gets to see Canadian Dollars, only US Dollars en Euro's allowed. Is that possible with a plugin?

#2
This request is quite absurd. not to say unprofessional bullshit :-). a come on really, all B2B people should use the same password? They are all honest, no one gives it away?They must fill out a form, but not register? This is like driving on a highway 20 miles per hour.

The cliënt does not want people to be able to see the price for businesess. The rest is there because of design, even though it might make more sense to do it differently.

Could you maybe also expand a little on why its bullshit? Not that I disagree, but it might be something I could use to convince my cliënt to go another way.

#3
looks like you have a completly wrong understanding of the shipment. You can have as many rates as you need, so you must create different shipmentmethods for different weights.

I think I understand the way shipments work. The problem lies in the fact that there's actually only one shipment cost (2.20) which needs to be added everytime the same product is added. This would mean I have to make a shipmentmethod  for 2 products (4.40) 3 products (6.60) 4 products (8.80) and so on.

If I were to do this by weight I'd have the same problem. Say the product weighs 1 kg. to ship this 1kg it costs 2.20. So I make a shipmentmethod for 1kg with a cost of 2.20. Now say someone wants to buy 2, the weight is now 2kg so I have to make another shipment method for 2kg with a cost of 4.40.

I need a way to make the shipment cost add up just like it would when you add products to the cart.

#4 Before starting to hack, you should ask first. What you want todo is almost completly native. The normal cart checkout process let oyu enter FIRST the address to display the correct shipment. Instead of bugging your customers, I think it is better to use the geolocator plugin.

The issue here is that you only see the cost of shipping when you've done your order and go to through the checkout process.
The cliënt wants the customer to be able to see the shipment cost without going to the cart first. This would mean I have to put the address step infront of the actual shop but not the entire step, just the country. (shipping is primarily country based).

Another issue is that the cliënt does not want to use the checkout process as provided by Virtuemart. He wanted it in a way that was impossible to achieve. We finally confinced him to go with a one page checkout.

I think I've got the geolocator installed through onpage checkout but it doesnt seem to be doing much of anything and I'm not really shure how to go about testing it.

#5 Maybe your client just wants this? http://extensions.virtuemart.net/extensions-virtuemart-2/eu-vat-checker-detail

That looks quite usefull! Thanks!.

This does bring me to another problem though, because the private route and business route are two different things I need to have the VAT-checker only in the business route.
The way I see to solve this is to have two different address checkouts, one with and one without the VAT-checker shopper field.

This is something I've run in before (The USA route cant have a country dropdown selection, the other route needs one) but I dont think this is something thats possible, to have two different address checkouts in one shop.

I hope I'm making atleast some sense in explaining the problems, I'm having a difficult enough time trying to explain them in my native language.