Application Logic... How to do ?

Application Logic... How to do ?

• sriniatl

  Gianni,

  I'm pretty sure you could develop this sort of B2B (Business-to-Business) interface with a little bit of work, and Commerce Server does offer quite a bit of the functionality you'd need to acheive this, but it might not end up looking exactly the way you describe it.

  You can leverage the API to allow external vendors to load up their own product catalogs, but you might need to know the schema of those catalogs beforehand (or at least enforce a standard schema across all vendors). This limitation exists because you can't allow these external suppliers to modify your actual SQL schema at run-time.

  Commerce Server does *not* in fact have a supplier table with each supplier's respective catalog, but the product catalog system supports several thousand product catalogs. When you think of things this way, Commerce Server can in fact aggregate thousands of suppliers, each with their own catalog of several hundred thousand products, onto a single B2C (Business to Consumer) channel, which sounds like the functionality you're looking for.

  Keep in mind that the figures I've used are dependent on hardware, and the product/sales team should be able to give you better estimates.

  
  
  

• comfixit

  If I understand correctly, you're looking for a way to coalesce several suppliers into a single web site. Commerce Server does offer some functionality for this, but it requires that you coordinate heavily with your suppliers.

  You'd start out with a pretty basic site (the Starter Site should be pretty sufficient), modifying the business logic and UI layer where necassary.

  The majority of the work is actually in the BizTalk/Integration layer.

  First, you need to obtain a copy of the supplier catalogs to be imported into the Commerce Server databases, and then you'd map the supplier catalogs to your own local product schemas. This would allow you to browse supplier catalogs on your local commerce site.

  The second task is coordinating the fulfillment process such that orders placed on your local system are actually propogated back to the appropriate fulfillment vendor.

  The Commerce Server BizTalk adapters are more than sufficient to handle this sort of work. I think the real difficulty here is making sure your suppliers expose the necassary endpoints. Specifically, your suppliers need to provide you with a catalog, and need to accept orders from an external system.

  
  
  

• pcompassion

  HI !

  thanks for responding to my post.

  I understood what you wrote.

  What I need is to permit to suppliers to register into my site (with all their data) and somehow put in their catalog.

  Once populated, I need to have the possibility to process an order (I need to buy from them).

  If I am not wrong, CS2007 does not have a kind of Supplier table that permit to add several supplier each one with a his catalog. Am I right

  Thanks,

  GGA

  
  
  
• Application Logic... How to do ?