I was recently made aware that there is a customization available for NetCommunity to build an online store.  If you are using this functionality, any feedback?

 Yes - IADMINISTER  the custom store for Parkinsons Disease Foundation, we use this for our free publications and educational materials.

Visit https://support.pdf.org/Page.aspx?pid=248 to take a look.  We run a fairly high volume, encountered several not quite ready for prime time kinks when we went live and the good news - Blackbaud and the Product development folks have been very responsive.  They are undergoing major overhaul to realy develop this product more along the lines of a full functional e-commerce solution scalable for all sorts of organizations.

At PDF we - utilize this store quite heavily,  been up for 6 months and over 5,000 individual transactions.  We have 15 inventory items, and ll but one are free.  We are using this solution in a way that was probably never envisioned when the Store was first being designed,  however I have already seen some marked improvements in the structure as they work there way into making this far more felxible - later this year.  

I do feel strongly - this is an excellent product for traditional store or catalogue  processing - as it is right now.  Once the new development work is complete - the eStore will be an even better value

I do caution - you should plan out exactly how you pan to configure the e-store and think of every possible scenario -  and what it willmean to your back end operations first. 

Hi,

We've just had the Estore installed at Tommy's and I have to say as it currently stands I would not recommend it.

• It does not support UK VAT
• Discounts have to be role based (rather than via a voucher-code system) which means people have to log in or regsiter before shopping.
• Discounts cannot be applied to price adjustments (applied through attributes).
• Overseas postage is selected via a drop down menu and the system will accept a choice of UK postage and an overseas shipping address (which adds another layer of admin inhouse to weed out the chancers)
• When setting up the store we couldn't use subcategories (Too complicated to go into but I can explain why to anyone who's interested)
• Shipping costs are calculated by weight only which leaves no room for economies of scale.
• When shopping people can't choose the quantity with a free text box - instead they will get one item only until they call up a 'Your basket' screen (which is not on the standard pathway) and change it there - extremely counter intuitive.
• If you want people to buy in selected bundles of 10,20 50 etc, you can apply a drop down menu in the attributes section BUT their selection will always be listed as 1 in the quantities column of the confirmation screen.
• Gift aid is applied to the whole transaction when it comes down to RE rather than just the donation.

If all your items are completely free than maybe it would work but we have a mixture of free items, items that are free but incur p&p and, in the future we hope to be able to add charged items...

Thanks for that information Deirdre, that's helpful as we're considering the store at the moment.

Do you know if the store works with Javascript disabled? I've had a quick look at the link posted above and it looks like all of the 'add to basket' links use Javascript...

Edit - just checked, they don't. Blackbaud don't seem overly concerned with accessibility, which is a bit of a worry.

Hi James,

I'm on ddebarra@tommys.org if you'd like to chat.

Regards,

Deirdre

I was the original poster for this thread.  My expectation was that the latest release of BBNC (version 6.10) would include an enhance 'eStore' as a standard part of the product.  I performed a quick perusal of the release notes and there is no mention of the eStore.  Anyone have any insights?