Does Commerce 2009 allow me to do this?

Question

Hi!

Im looking into a case study for a customer of mine, and since I worked a lot with MS I wanted to dig into this forum a bit and see what Commerce 2009 can do for me.

Basically, my client want to host a e-commerce solution which at first looks like a marketplace or galleria where the user can browse diffferent kind of webshops based on interest. Like food/cooking, sports, etc etc. And then the individual webshops can be accessed through this portal/galleria interface.

From what I can see in Commerce 2009, it only allow hosting of multiple webshops, but no natural way to tie them together in a marketplace? Is this corrct?

Would it be possible to develop this functionality ourselves if we buy a standard edition?

kind regards
Henny - .NET Consultant

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Henrik

Answer 1

Henny,
What I understood is that you want to develop a common platform where you want to host all webshops in commerce server and provide a common interface (market place) to access these web shops.

The concept is similar to white labelling and we can implement them easily in commerce server enterprise edition (you can use standard edition and depends on your application architecture model). Think Commerce server as platform and don't think this as a product and everything can be achievable with custom coding (adding to OOB functionality). Currently I don't have case study (reach out to MS on this) but I have written a whitepaper on this topic and unfortunately I can't share with everyone.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
-Ravi Kanth Koppala

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Answer 2

Hi!

Thanks for the answer, I will dig in deeper into the "white labeling". So far I have found very little info on how to develop further in the Commerce server, because all is very abstract at the moment. The platform has lots of capabilities, but I wanna find out how difficult it is to customize the processes... '

For example, my customer want the marketplace to work just like a real marketplace, if you enter  awebshop, and then shop some items, you can't leave that shop and return to the marketplace without wihtout either dropping your shopping bag or pay for the goods.

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Henrik

Answer 3

Hi Henrik,

You could setup multiple commerce sites under a Commerce Server enterprise licence, and possibly consider MOSS (SharePoint) for the automation of creating these sites. You can then setup multiple sites under subdomiains e.g. www.shop1.marketplace.com www.shop2.marketingplace.com and use the MOSS webservices, and Commerce Foundation API's to help aggregate contents into one primary portal www.marketplace.com . As each site is independant of one another they would have there own shopping baskets, checkout, etc - but content would be aggregated into central location.

So to answer your questions, the new Commerce Server 2009 framework better suits your purpose, but would need some tweaking to get the solution to where you want it to be.

Thanks,
Lewis

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