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"Super" level required above Categories..I think?


kevindownie

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I have a requirement from a customer who wants the UK split into 7 geographical areas and, dependent on where they are, they will see a range of products and services available to them.

 

Effectively, I want to create a home page which says "which area are you in?" then, whichever one they click on, they will enter a "walled-garden" of products available in their area.

 

Is there a way I can do this without using the first level Category as "Region"?

 

Thank you in anticipation of your help on this.

 

Kevin

 

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Consider setting up 7 subdomains (southeast.company.co.uk, etc.) and see if you can steer the user to the appropriate one via IP address. This sounds like a similar problem to, say, Google sending visitors to a country-specific version of their site (search engine), but you may not have distinct enough IP ranges within your country. Allow the visitor to override the automatic selection whenever they want to, and drop a cookie or put something in the customer data so that they aren't asked for the zone each time. Maybe once they have an address on file, you could geolocate that to figure the zone. At any rate, make it easy to switch zones at any time if they find themselves in the wrong one.

 

Is your client's proposal a reasonable approach? Rather than splitting the country into zones, each with its own basket of products and services, is there any other approach that could be taken? Maybe they have asked to do it this way, based on what they've always done with old delivery methods, but in the Internet age this might be embarrassingly outdated. Are there legal or regulatory requirements that they operate this way?

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Thanks for your suggestion Phil.

 

The requirement is mainly because the services ordered are delivered in person (such as wedding cars, mobile discos etc) so they need to within a hundred miles or so. 

 

Unfortunately IP addresses are not specific enough within the UK to determine where people are.

 

I guess what I'm looking for is a "super filter" which applies to the product range so, when someone has told osCommerce where they are, they only see categories & products within that area.

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Do your client's products and services all have the same geographical constraints? How flexible can they be -- say, all the wedding limos in Kent are hired out, but there's still one in Sussex -- would they eat the extra expense of that more distant one to save a sale? You want to be careful about too rigidly dividing up the territory, and losing sales unnecessarily. I'm guessing that right now they have manual scheduling that uses human reasoning to decide when to stretch boundaries to maximize income (especially customers near a boundary). Or, are they satisfied that they can put down hard boundaries in order to automate the process, keeping each region with a separate inventory that doesn't cross lines?

 

Just because each region keeps its own inventory doesn't mean that your client couldn't quickly shift a few cars from one to another, and update the inventories, on anticipated demand. However, if they have to do a lot of that, not only would it be a strain and error prone, even with quick updates using Easy Populate. On the other hand, to have a nationwide inventory would maximize inventory in use, but might mean shifting a car from Liverpool to London (a money-losing proposition, unless they can make it up by saving the business on other hires). In the US, nationwide car and other rental (hire) companies are constantly moving their inventory -- a U-Haul (trailer) registered in Arizona can easily be found on a U-Haul dealer's lot in New York. I assume that they would try to hire it out to someone moving stuff towards the West, so eventually it could end up back in Arizona.

 

If your client is going to have strictly separated inventories, I would still consider going with 7 different regional subdomains, each with their own osC installation. The master site could list every kind of hire, and ask the customer to say where they are, and then redirect them to a subdomain. That might be easier than trying to tag each piece of inventory with the region it's in (in one central database). That brings up the following thought: tag each piece with its "home port" in the central database, and allow hires not only to the home region, but also to the immediate neighboring regions. That would give better utilization. Maybe a small surcharge could apply to going out of the home region?

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Hi Phil

 

Thanks for your thoughts and I have come to a similar conclusion that we will have to have 7 installs. Each area is quite large but of course there will be people on the borders of areas who may want to look for the services in a neighbouring area so they will be able to from the "front screen".

 

Onwards with the development now!

 

Thanks again.

 

Kevin

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