1] Product Management: Is there the capability to allow for shared choices where multiple products can share attributes. For example, 3 shirts can use the same color choices without having to add them individually, and when updating choices, it dynamically shows up on all associated products.
2] Product Management: Is there the capability to copy characteristics from other products, such as copying categories, choices, prices, etc.
3] Product Management: Is there the capability to clone products to create new sku's?
4] Product Management: Is there the capability to show a primary product, but only it's accessory choices are added to the cart. For example: You have a "Whistle", and you can choose from the following options: Key of "C", "D", "E". Each key has it's own sku, and therefore you wouldn't want "whistle" added to the cart, but rather "Key of C". I am guessing this can be accomplished by "kitting".
5] Product Management: If the above can be accomplished, can you assign the accessory choices their own sku, or is that dependent on the primary product. The reason for asking this is because the sku's would need to match the products in Quick Books so an import would work correctly.
6] Product Management: If the accessory items work as listed above, can they be hidden from product search results so that customers would be forced to reference the primary product?
7] Image Management: If large images are uploaded via FTP (referenced by sku.jpg], will Able automatically assign those images to the products and dynamically resize them accordingly, or is that only done by uploading the images individually through the control panel?
8] Category Management: If a product is added to a sub category, can it dynamically be added to it's parent category. For example, you have a category called "hats", and underneath that you have a sub category called "brown hats". If you add a product to "brown hats", can it show up under "hats"?
9] Category Management: When listing products into a category grid, how would products with attribute choices work?... od would it?
10] Navigation: Do users have the ability to roll over categories to view sub categories? If not out of the box, I am assuming this can be done with CSS.
11] Navigation: Do administrators have control over the link listing view of the navigation bar. For instance, when a user drill down sub-categories, is it possible to view the top level categories at all times?
12] Content Management: Is there the capability to have content rotators (BV calls them "HTML Rotators"]? This allows the administrator to have additional random options for content blocks
13] Content Management: To add new informational pages in BV Commerce, I would utilize BV's category pages so everything would be in the database and automatically referenced in the navigation. Can I easily use this type of method in Able, or would I have to create a static pages (e.g. duplicating default.aspx]?
14] Custom Designs: I notice website design in Able is primarily driven by CSS, which is great. Are there any layout's that will not work with Able? For instance, I notice all examples I have reviewed look rather "blocky" and are constrained for traditional header, navigation, and footer areas. Is it possible to bleed a design say from the header to the navigation? As an example, take a look at a less traditional layout: http://www.gfxinternetservices.com/ (while it's not a e-commerce site, I wanted to show an untraditional design to see if I have any limitations.)
15] Coding: Is Able Commerce W3C compliant?
16] Coding: When making customizations to functionality, does the entire website need to be recompiled, or only specific files? In my current e-commerce package, the core DLL would need to be recompiled requiring many unrelated source files, which makes things not as easy as I would like... especially for highly customized websites.
17] Payment Processor: Will SecurePay be included in Able?
18] Functionality: Is it possible to hide prices of products from a specific manufacturer unless the customer is logged in?
19] Promotions: Is it possible to generate gift certificates when customers spend over $x & expire after x days.
20] Shipping: Can you offer free shipping to customers if the spend over $x, and if so can you disallow specific products to take advantage of that promotion (for example heavy products].
21] Will Able come out with a conversion tool specific to BV Commerce 2004 that will import all products / categories?
Perhaps I should have separated this out into seperate posts... what a huge list of questions
. Thank you very much for your time on this. I appreciate the review.
