Re: Multi-Owner Cart system

[Kyle Hayes <kyle540@quicknet.net>]

On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Jerry Fowler wrote:

> ******    message to minivend-users from "Jerry Fowler" <jerry@robisondesign.com>     ******
> 
> Greetings Minivenders.
> Here is my imponderment:
> 
> I am operating a website for a Multilevel Marketing Vitamin company using
> a minivend cart. The vitamin company sells their members web pages
> under the company's domain so that the members can sell vitamins online.
> The funds will be deposited into the vitamin company's account, and sales
> commissions will be disbursed to the members on a monthly basis.
> The cart system needs to be set up in such a way that people can
> purchase vitamins from the individual member's page.
> Now that you understand my needed setup, here is my question:
> 
> How would I set up a cart in such a way that Minivend would track
> the member ID and submit it along with the order?

We have a number of resellers in various places around the world and need
to track all sales to make sure that we provide the correct pricing etc.
In addition, we have some customers who buy wholesale (so tax is...
interesting).  Currently, all resellers host their own pages, but we are
moving to support hosting for them if necessary.

While I don't have the site up yet, the way that I am doing this
is based on the partner ID.  Somewhere buried in the FAQ for MV 3.12
(3.10?) is a note that you can put a string like: ";;reseller42" into the
URL that points to the first MV page.  By first MV page, I mean the first
one that is served by MV.

http://www.myco.com/cgi-bin/index?blah,blah,blah;;reseller42

This will make sure that the value [data session source] gets set to the
string "reseller42".  This value is stored throughout the life of the
session and is only set once during a bowser session.  If you want to
change the value, you have to drop the browser and start it back up again.
I think that the ;;xxxxx string has to be at the end of the URL.

I use this to create many "home" pages for the resellers.  They each get a
different ID.  When I show a product page, I get all the prices/items
based on this ID.  It is always passed in to all my SQL.  Note that I use
SQL for nearly all tables now.  While not quite as easy to edit with a
text editor, I get to use all kinds of nice tools to maintain the tables.
With the information we get from the orders, we are able to generate
reports etc. to figure out how much bill each reseller and how much to
give back.

This allows me to have different prices, items, even pages per reseller.
Yet, I only have about five MV pages total (OK, there is a lot of perl on
some of them :-).  I haven't started changing the logos on the page yet,
but I am sure that will be requested soon.

In order to change how order processing is done, you'll need to look a lot
at the report page (in the simple demo I think it is in simple/etc/report,
but I might be wrong).  I dump all orders into yet another SQL table for
back-end processing.  There is a section in the manual on order
processing.  You'll want to look at the web site for more info.  I had to
read though a couple of sections before I finally started to get a clue.

Now, if someone can tell me how I can change the e-mail that gets sent to
include my order number, not MV's, I will be a happy camper...

Best,
Kyle