AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Hi,

I am currently running the demo of AbleCommerce and have noticed that there is no feature to record a Brand.

I have noticed some posts relating to using the Manufacturer field as the Brand, but in my case, i would need to have both. I would need the Manufacturer for Admin searching, as a Brand can be made by several manufacturers, and similarly a manufacturer could have several brands.

From the point of view of the front end, i would only need to display the brand, so that customers could search by brand via a drop-down for example, but from an Admin point of view, we would need the flexibility of searching for products by Manufacturer and/or Brand.

I assume that this is possible, however how easy would this be to achieve? I am completely new to .NET and don't really have any development skills as this side.

I have also read posts that show how to add "custom fields", but i need to make sure that:

1) The information can be related to Manufacturer in the DB.

2) It can be applied to all products, for example to a default template

3) Is searchable from the front end

Has anyone used this combination before? I would appreciate any help on the best way to achieve this and any tips on what i would need to change to achieve this.

Many Thanks

Andrew

Hi,

Following on from this, i am considering just using the "Vendor" and "Manufacturer" functions, so for example, i am going to use the Vendor as the Manufacturer/Supplier, and use the Manufacturer as the Brand/Range.

My questions are now:

1) How easy would it be to amend the field name from Manufacturer to "Brand" or "Brand/Range", and how would i achieve that?

2) How can i add Brand/Range in to the Side Bar, so that customers can search by Brand or Range? I know that a link appears where people can then click to see all the products for the range, but i would also like to add this as another category-style search feature in the sidebar, either by listing them the same as the categories or a drop down box to select the brand/range to search for.

Thanks

Andrew

There are some posts in Good References Forum about how to list products for manufacturer and vendors have a look on those posts may be they help you. Secondly if you want your custom field for product to accomodate this information you can make use of ac_CustomProductFields table to do this. There is a post about how to create a new ac_ProductCustomField and expose it on edit product page for admin update.
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=9088
You can create one custom field to store your custom brand information. Then you would need to create some product display page that can filter products depending upon their brand custom field.