Are configurable products supported in CS 2007 In my case I have a product that consists of several components. The buyer has to choose a variant of each component to get the final product. The price also depends on the components that the buyer has selected. Is this scenario supported in the standard product catalog model
I also wonder if subscriptions are supported (for example, a subscription of a news magazine, a new order is generated automatically once every month)
Configurable products
JIM.H.
Endeavor Commerce (www.endeavorcommerce.com) sells a great "Smart Catalog" (Configuration Engine) for Commerce Server. I've used this in the past to develop a "Dell" like user interface for configuring products.
Jeff Lynch
MVP Windows Server System - Commerce Server
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeff.lynch
Samer Selo
Another option to look at for subscriptions is an offering of payment gateways like CyberSource where they will process the recurring transaction for you. The benefit there is that they store the payment information in a secure data center (PCI compliant) which takes the risk off you maintaining that information.
Cheers,
Colin
KoenP
Configurable products are in fact supported in most versions of Commerce Server, although perhaps not in the capacity most people would like. I believe the concept is addressed in the MSPress CS2002 book, but I'll attempt to give you an abridged explanation.
The typical approach is to create a product variant representing each possible combination of products. For instance, you've got a product, Prod1, which can either be of type 1 or type 2, and can be of color A or color B. So, your product variant would be represented internally as Prod1_1_A, Prod1_2_A, Prod1_1_B, and Prod_1_2_B. You can see that it can get pretty complex when you add more and more factors to it. You can also assign cutom pricing to variants, so this solution would solve your business need.
The other option is to use "bundled products" as discussed here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/maxakbar/archive/2006/11/01/product-bundling-with-commerce-server-2007.aspx
This is a bit more elegant, and it allows you to sell the individual "components" if necassary, but you'll have to determine which solution is ideal for your business.
Also, there is no "subscription" mechanism out of the box, but you could develop a custom solution for this with relative ease using BizTalk or a simple application which is invoked by Task Scheduler.