Wine sales website with advanced search / what CMS?

Hi There

Haven't been here for a while.

A client of mine needs a website for wine sales.

It should have advanced search covering fields such as:
Wine
Producer
Vintage
Region
Rating

This is illustrated here:

http://www.seckfordwines.co.uk/advanced-wine-search.asp

the detailed search on:
http://www.frw.co.uk/

and here:
http://www.farrvintners.com/wine_search.php

Normally use joomla, but dont think it will work for this one. What CMS would you recommend. The main problem is the catalogue / search functionality.

Thanks alot!!
Dylan

 

Anybody? The client is in a rush.

I had a look at magento, looks like it could work, but i have never used it. I normally use joomla.

Your advice will be much appreciated.

 

Magento is the way to go if you want to knock this out of the park. You will look like a rockstar 1.4 is fairly new and stable now and has loads of additional marketing features.

Steer clear of Joomla. That stuff is a real mess.

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

Hi Nigel

thanks for the input. I have downloaded magento and set it up locally in order to have a look The site will most likely not take orders, but I presume that ordering functionality can be disabled.

Dylan

 

Hi, I think this will work for you or you can handle this with your custom template by leaving out some bits if need be.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/20853/

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

@ Nigel Lew

Sorry to bother again.

I installed Magento locally and all looks good.

The client has since decided that taking online orders won't be a bad thing, so there's no longer a need to disable this functionality.

They do however need the site to do the following:

Clients buy wine from them, which they then store in their cellar (the wine company's cellar). The client needs to be able to login on the website and see their 'wine portfolio'.

Any idea if this can be achieved with Magento and how?

A couple of things to consider:
- If they purchase wine in the online store, will it be automatically added to their wine 'portfolio' page
- what happens if they purchase in the physical store as opposed to the online store, can the administrator then add the stock to their portfolio?

UPDATE:
Spoken to the client again. The 'wine portfolio' and the shopping cart must not be synced; they are two independent systems. So I just need a basic section where the client can login and see what wine they own in the cellar.

Your help will be much appreciated.

Dylan

 

I am going to have to think this one over but I am doing a few e-commerce sites this weekend so I can poke around a bit.

The problem is the client would have to create an account on the site(or someone does) so they can see what was manually added to their profile if they came into the store. This is going to pose a range of logistical issues.

It is certainly doable custom coded but I suspect that is a fair amount of work. If someone purchases something from the site its not so bad. Perhaps as you could add a custom order field. So you would have pending, shipped, in the cellar for instance. This again poses a few logistical considerations as it creates a bit of work for the site owner.

Nigel

 

Hi Nigel

Did you have a chance to look into this?

Creating an account would not be an issue, I'm sure the administrator could do this.

Thanks, Dylan

 

Not exactly, sorta swamped but I was looking at this yesterday which is fairly helpful.

http://www.casualcommerce.com/2009/01/magento-notes-how-to-modify-customer-dashboard/

That is certainly where that would need to go and can likely be as simple as a text box display.

sooo... in theory that is where your output would go and you would place an input text box somewhere on the admin end. I have not quite sorted that bit out intuitively though in terms of tying it to a customer.

That is fairly close though. I will keep thinking about it. I am taking a bit of a beating this week.

Ultimately I am thinking you can have an "add client to cellar" option of sorts in the client list view from the admin or give it its own page in the admin panel that has add client to cellar as a drop down field and then a text box.

The problem with the latter is, once you have a bunch of clients the dropdown it's no longer intuitive. It may be best to add this field directly to a client profile on the admin side somewhere so you can simply check it somewhere on his profile(or main customer list) and the text box would then appear.

hope that makes some sense lol...
Nigel