How to Create an Catalog System¶
Catalog system is a special type of online store that is used in B2B commerce transactions. You are not selling anything through this platform – you just enable another company (or person) to create an online request for the goods or services you manufacture, provide or sell. Enquiry is, unlike the standard online store order, non-obligational. Your clients are only expressing the volume of their interest in your business. An enquiry can help you with an opinion about the client. Thanks to that you can contact them with a personalized offer.
This tutorial has one prerequisite – you need to have a functional online store. If you don’t have one yet, you can use our tutorial and create one. Remember you don’t have to create delivery and payment services, invoices, credit notes or purchase and order confirmation e-mails. There are also a few changes in the settings:
Go to the E-shop Settings (located in the Administration module). If you have created this setting as a part of your online store, you can edit it. Otherwise create a new E-shop Settings. The difference between standard online store and a request catalog is in the E-Shop Type field. Here you have to select the Catalog type. Second change is, you don’t need a Checkout. .. image:: /_static/tutorial/catalog01.png
On the third tab you add an e-mail for Enquiry Confirmation. This e-mail is used just like the Order and Purchase Confirmation e-mails. You have to code the template for this e-mail first (this needs to be done in a particular website settings module in the Templates application). Here you will select the template and define its purpose as an eRequest Confirmation. A content of this e-mail is just alike the Order Confirmation e-mail – you should provide the base info about the enquiry – names of requested items, their recommended price and your contact information.
Create a new page to which the client will be redirected from the last step of checkout in case he/she creates an enquiry. This page’s name will be successful-enquiry for the purposes of this tutorial.
Create a new page that will contain info about the enquiry. Here you can display the information about the enquiry.
Insert the eidget from the previous step to the successful-enquiry page.
The last step in checkout (which should contain the Checkout Overview form) also needs to be edited. You have to redirect clients to the successful-enquiry page in case they place their enquiry. In the code of a page that contains the Checkout Overview form add an “on-success-redirect” attribute to the eidget (example: change this piece of code <bb:widget name=” checkout-overview” on-success-redirect=”successful-request” /> to this <bb:widget name=”checkout-overview” on-success-redirect=”successful-enquirys” />). The “checkout-overview” is the name of the Widget we use in this tutorial. Your widget can have a different name.
Enquiries created like this are available in the Sales module, in the Enquiries application. Here you can select a particular enquiry and click the Details button. All information about the client and his/her enquiry are displayed.