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Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

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Juan Fernández,修改在12 年前。

Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Legend 帖子: 1261 加入日期: 08-10-2 最近的帖子
Hi guys:

for the last two weeks we've had an interesting discussion in the spanish forums about liferay becoming an e-commerce platform.
I want to bring the discussion to a wider public so I'm translating a summary of the discussion to go on with the brainstorm in English.
We have focused on improvements for the shopping portlet and other general improvements that would be needed to make it easier for users to create online shops with Liferay.

I know there are many online shops build with Liferay all over the world, so I'd like you to express your needs, your frustrations, your wishes about this concrete subject.

I personally think one of Liferay's main advantages comparing with other products are it's social capabilities, so I think social shopping features (voting, rating, comments, product links...) are an important thing to focus on.

Here's the list of proposals we've had so far:

[indent]- Integrate shop products in the asset system - this will provide the shop with tagging, categorization, comments, links, social equity, ratings, custom fields...
- Integrate the shopping process with the workflow system
- Separate the shopping in several portlets (back-office and front-office)
- Improve shipping cost calculus with geogrphic and weight information about the products and customers
- Billing: develop a very simple ERP and an ERP integration framework
- Manage stock refunds in the stock section
- Import/export products from other systems
- Reports and statistics tools integration for data analysis (Jasper-iReport/Pentaho...)
- Payment system integration made easier for developers to add new payment modules
[/indent]

What do you think about this?
Thanks for your feedback!
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Szymon Gołębiewski,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Regular Member 帖子: 246 加入日期: 09-6-8 最近的帖子
IMHO Liferay should stay as CMS and integration platform. There are many very good e-commerce applications built on Java stack like Magento. You can integrate them in some part with Liferay by using CAS, LDAP or embeding LR portlets on their pages. I don't see any reason to go in that direction with liferay where there are still many bugs in it's core functionalities. What will you get is only cms and only half of e-commerce (comparing to other ecom apps).
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M. Garcia,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Regular Member 帖子: 107 加入日期: 11-5-17 最近的帖子
Szymon Gołębiewski:
IMHO Liferay should stay as CMS and integration platform. There are many very good e-commerce applications built on Java stack like Magento. You can integrate them in some part with Liferay by using CAS, LDAP or embeding LR portlets on their pages. I don't see any reason to go in that direction with liferay where there are still many bugs in it's core functionalities. What will you get is only cms and only half of e-commerce (comparing to other ecom apps).


Yes, I think the main focus should be stabilizing the core and functionalities provided. Many are good but it feels so much like a beta software, and sometimes far from user/developper-friendly.

On the other hand, this brainstorm is interesting, I'm just challenging the focus Liferay should have emoticon
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jelmer kuperus,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Legend 帖子: 1191 加入日期: 10-3-10 最近的帖子
There's also konakart they actually integrate with liferay
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Tiago Lopes,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

New Member 发布: 1 加入日期: 11-3-24 最近的帖子
Hi,

That functionality would be interesting. I would add the ability to isolate the "store" for each community so each community would have the functionality available but with it's separate product, payment meas, etc.

Regards,
Tiago
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Alexey Kakunin,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 621 加入日期: 08-7-7 最近的帖子
Hi!
It is nice to see Liferay will improve ShoppingPortlet - it was one of the less usable part of Liferay.
Another feature I think will be useful - multilanguage support for ShoppingItems.

By the way - we already did a lot of these improvements (like asset-integration, multilanguage support, orders management and so on) in our project http://n4.biz
You can check like shopping items looks like (collected from all companies): http://n4.biz/en/products

==
Alexey Kakunin
EmDev Limited
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Juan Fernández,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Legend 帖子: 1261 加入日期: 08-10-2 最近的帖子
Alexey Kakunin:

By the way - we already did a lot of these improvements (like asset-integration, multilanguage support, orders management and so on) in our project http://n4.biz


Wow Alexey! That is a very nice project. Did you use the default shopping portlet or did you create everything from scratch? Thanks for sharing!
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Alexey Kakunin,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 621 加入日期: 08-7-7 最近的帖子
As update for that post.
We improved ShoppingItem object to make it as complete asset (with categories, tags, workflow and other things support) and implemented our first production shop for one russian company: shop.redfox.ru (sorry - shop only in Russian)

Our changes are fully compatible with liferay and may be deployed as set of portlets on top of liferay (6.1.1 CE or 6.1.20 EE), so, as soon as marketplace will allow us to do it - we will distribute this solution via Liferay Marketplace

==
Alexey Kakunin
EmDev Limited
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Juan Fernández,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Legend 帖子: 1261 加入日期: 08-10-2 最近的帖子
Alexey Kakunin:
We will distribute this solution via Liferay Marketplace


Wow, Alexey! Those are awesome news! Cool!
Do you plan to make it open source so that the community can contribute with improvements?
Thanks for sharing
Juan
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Alexey Kakunin,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 621 加入日期: 08-7-7 最近的帖子
Hi Juan!
As I wrote before - part of job we did - we extended functionaluty related to ShoppingItem. Like added asset-renderer, support for workflows and other standard Liferay things. In general - it looks like Shopping API was written long-long time ago and never updated after it to support newer liferay functionality.

This extensions I hope will be part of Liferay core (since they are related to core objects) and here we will be happy to contribute it into liferay.

Other parts - like extended search, filtering, shopping cart processing and other things - I'm not sure we will distribute it as open-source, but will be happy to share it via Marketplace (then it will support it).
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Juan Fernández,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Legend 帖子: 1261 加入日期: 08-10-2 最近的帖子
Hi Alexey:

Alexey Kakunin:
...Like added asset-renderer, support for workflows and other standard Liferay things. In general - it looks like Shopping API was written long-long time ago and never updated after it to support newer liferay functionality. This extensions I hope will be part of Liferay core (since they are related to core objects) and here we will be happy to contribute it into liferay.


That would be a nice contribution to the core, and many community members will love to have this plugin updated. Remember when you start contributing to split the features in the smallest chunks possible so that it is more likely to get to the core.

Ping me and I'll help you with this contribution process, as I see it really interesting
Thanks for your offering to contribute, Alexey
Juan
Pietro Piccoli,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

New Member 帖子: 8 加入日期: 12-1-25 最近的帖子
Alexey Kakunin:
As update for that post.
We improved ShoppingItem object to make it as complete asset (with categories, tags, workflow and other things support) and implemented our first production shop for one russian company: shop.redfox.ru (sorry - shop only in Russian)

Our changes are fully compatible with liferay and may be deployed as set of portlets on top of liferay (6.1.1 CE or 6.1.20 EE), so, as soon as marketplace will allow us to do it - we will distribute this solution via Liferay Marketplace

==
Alexey Kakunin
EmDev Limited


Hi,
Do you plan a release with commercial license (with and/or without source code) ?
Is your solution extensible with plugin like payment gateway plugin, discount rules plugin and other types of plugins as classic e-commerce platform ( eg.: magento, prestashop, nopcommerce platform) has?

Thanks

Pietro
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Alexey Kakunin,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 621 加入日期: 08-7-7 最近的帖子
Pietro, hi!

Do not expect from our plugin full-functional e-commerce solution like magento & co.
We hope to support all these features, but right now it is not implemented.
Actually - current state of solution is not allowed to sell it "as a box" - it is why we do not distributing it as product - it is more like a platform helped us to build e-commerce solution for concrete customer.
Pietro Piccoli,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

New Member 帖子: 8 加入日期: 12-1-25 最近的帖子
Alexey Kakunin:
Pietro, hi!

Do not expect from our plugin full-functional e-commerce solution like magento & co.
We hope to support all these features, but right now it is not implemented.
Actually - current state of solution is not allowed to sell it "as a box" - it is why we do not distributing it as product - it is more like a platform helped us to build e-commerce solution for concrete customer.



Hi Alexey,
thanks for the answer. Have you plan to distribute your "platform" (If yes what's type of license you have choosen?) so it is possible for other to extend the functionality of platform itself?

Thanks
Pietro
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Alexey Kakunin,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 621 加入日期: 08-7-7 最近的帖子
Hi Pietro, sorry for do not answering back.
Initially this project was a "one-customer project", we just developed solution for concrete customer, of course we tried to be "general" but it was not always possible.
Now we are working to make these portlets to be reusable and I hope to release version 1.0 soon. This version will include:
* set of improvements for core Shopping API - I hope it will be included into core Liferay in some day (for now we are working for extracting them to be placed as pull-requests into Liferay repository)
* set of portlets provided browsing, searching, shopping card, items administration, orders processing
* optional integration with workflow (for orders processing) and crm
As well as it will allow third-party companies develop own plugins to extend solution by adding own delivery and payment methods.

We prepared demo on Eglish - http://www.emdev.ru/-/video-building-e-commerce-solution-based-on-liferay - hope it will give you more ideas how it looks like for now.



==
Alexey Kakunin
EmDev Limited
Pietro Piccoli,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

New Member 帖子: 8 加入日期: 12-1-25 最近的帖子
Alexey Kakunin:
Hi Pietro, sorry for do not answering back.
Initially this project was a "one-customer project", we just developed solution for concrete customer, of course we tried to be "general" but it was not always possible.
Now we are working to make these portlets to be reusable and I hope to release version 1.0 soon.

We prepared demo on Eglish - http://www.emdev.ru/-/video-building-e-commerce-solution-based-on-liferay - hope it will give you more ideas how it looks like for now.


Thanks for your detailed answer,
I would like to know what's type of license you have chosen for your solution.

Thanks

Pietro
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Jader Francia,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Junior Member 帖子: 65 加入日期: 10-1-31 最近的帖子
I think too that social features, today, are really important in a ecommerce system.
And, IMHO, I will see the possibility to browse shopping items by its characteristics, and not only "by category".
And the possibility to connect them with features such as "those who have bought this product also bought this" or with dipendencies to make up and cross selling.
Anyway: thanks to ask us! ;)

Jed
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Philippe CHEIPE,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Junior Member 帖子: 61 加入日期: 10-8-12 最近的帖子
"Coupon" management and promotions systems (special offers, saving, ...) are also usually requested.

To answer to Szymon, that's right that some specialized systems would answer best (like Magento), but for me, it is important that Liferay can propose a "standard" e-commerce feature for "simple" e-commerce needs.

It's like the ecm: if you have basic needs, you can use the one shipped in Liferay (easier to deploy and fully integrated), if you want a "stronger" one, let's use Alfresco integrated within Liferay.
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Tomas Polesovsky,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 676 加入日期: 09-2-13 最近的帖子
Hi Juan

few thoughts from me. I don't have much time to analyze it the way it deserves, so I can be wrong somewhere - I'm sorry if I make any confusion.

There is too much functionality in the Shopping portlet. It should be decomposed. I see following portlets (at least):
For customers
a, Categories (or somehow bound categories to portal pages 1:1) - at least friendly URLs for SEO!
b, List of products in category (list of images please please - or maybe allow user to setup own template?) with detail (also templated?)
c, Shopping cart
d, My orders & history (by default in control panel) - something like my account in classical e-shop
e, Search scoped to shopping items

For admin
a, List of all relevant customers (not all users)
b, List of all orders
c, Shop settings in control panel (Config mode settings is OK, but it's per-portlet, not per-site)

New important features (important for me emoticon )
* Creation of PDF invoices
* Support for custom payment modules
* HTML editor for categories and for product description
* Possibility to assign image also for category, more images for one product (i.e. sets of small-medium-full images) with lightbox-style gallery
* Simple built-in stats
* Possibility to specify template for list/detail of product (as I've mentioned above) and replace functionality (e.g. replace PDF Invoice generation with custom implementation)
* Support for multiple shipping carriers (with different payment for different countries)

Maybe I've forgot something but these points seem to me really important, without them I can't image to run my shop emoticon

Thanks.

-- tom
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Juan Fernández,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Legend 帖子: 1261 加入日期: 08-10-2 最近的帖子
Tomas Polesovsky:
Hi Juan, few thoughts from me


Hi Tomas! That's a nice bunch of features! Thanks for your contribution.
I'll recap all ideas and create a new wiki page in the proposals node

Thanks a lot guys for your ideas! Let's see where this is heading in the future.


[Update] Here's the link to the wiki page -> http://www.liferay.com/es/community/wiki/-/wiki/Proposals/Liferay+as+an+e-commerce+platform
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Szymon Gołębiewski,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Regular Member 帖子: 246 加入日期: 09-6-8 最近的帖子
After couple of months i see this is going much further than "simple e-commerce" solution. Vouchers, promotional codes, download. Wouldn't it be better to prepare good liferay connector to existing e-commerce (helo Magento emoticon ) or improve API/REST/all-other-integration-technologies?
Jan Tošovský,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 565 加入日期: 10-7-22 最近的帖子
I've just found another promising Java open source project http://www.broadleafcommerce.org/site/index.htm
Jan Tošovský,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 565 加入日期: 10-7-22 最近的帖子
Crucial features for my use case:
- handling of downloadable products (accessing download links for certain time range, counting downloads, rejecting download attempts above the limit)
- voucher system (discount via the code which is entered to the special field in processing the order)
- suppressing VAT completely for shops which sell the goods without it.
- to be prepared for customizable products. Probably via custom fields. http://www.configurateurvisuel.fr/fr/329-t-shirt-a-personnaliser-full-.html
- allow orders without creating an account
- (optionally) one-page-checkout system http://www.prestashop.com/blog/article/the_feature_of_the_week_one_page_checkout/

Btw, several possibilities how to utilize social networking in the shop: http://www.prestashop.com/blog/article/4_practical_tips_to_take_advantage_of_social_networking/

You can see my inspiration is PrestaShop. This shop has really a lot of nice features, but it is PHP based.

Best regards, Jan
pavel muriy,修改在11 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

New Member 发布: 1 加入日期: 12-7-25 最近的帖子
Jan Tošovský:
Crucial features for my use case:
- allow orders without creating an account


This is very important feature for online shop.
Pietro Piccoli,修改在12 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

New Member 帖子: 8 加入日期: 12-1-25 最近的帖子
I've seen BroadleafCommerce me too (http://www.broadleafcommerce.org/site/features.htm http://www.broadleafcommerce.org/confluence/display/BLC15/Key+Architectural+Aspects)
and it seem a nice project. Is there a possibility to integrate in LifeRay ?

Thanks.

Pietro
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Brad Buhl,修改在10 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

New Member 帖子: 2 加入日期: 13-3-7 最近的帖子
Pietro, I work at Broadleaf Commerce and we have built a tight integration into Liferay through catalog, cart and checkout portlets which are all tied through Spring security and authentication.

Check us out and please do let me know if you have an immediate client need - would be happy to discuss!

Brad Buhl
Dir, Marketing & Channel Strategy
Broadleaf Commerce
bbuhl@broadleafcommerce.com
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lou cat,修改在10 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Regular Member 帖子: 196 加入日期: 12-1-26 最近的帖子
Hello!

I'm very interested in this thread as I'm currently trying to use the Shopping Portlet and I feel like I am the only one (as my unanswered thread shows...) working with this "dummy" portlet.

I think Liferay should try to have a simple but working portlet (I am using LR 6.0.6 CE and I've seen a 6.1 version very quickly but the shopping portlet didn't seem different to me).

My suggestions, which are a mixture of new features and not properly working ones (or if they do but I didn't find the right way to make them work, please forgive me and point me to the correct direction):

- export the shop products/categories with LAR
- search not case-sensitive!
- possibility to buy for guest users
- in the checkout once they are forced to login (or register) they should be able to see the previous cart and come back directly to that (the cart completely disappears)
- easy integration with other card systems but paypal (something that doesn't imply we have to store credit cards details...)
- easy way to handle information about the transaction (IPN for paypal seems to work but if only I'd found some information about how to customize the listener..)
- the customer shouldn't see all those buttons in the "orders" tab if they can't do those actions (for example "send shipping email") .Probably the idea of separating in 2 portlets is good.
- easy subscription/buying of downloadable products (we just want to give access to certain documents, so digital products that can be hosted in liferay document library)
- as soon as I update the item (if I change anything), its image disappears!
- easy way to customize the necessary fields in checkout
- it appears as a 4 tabs portlet but when we enter cart.jsp that it's not a tab anymore...
- the comments for the orders weren't working properly (what is their purpose in fact?) and even the portal setting to remove it wasn't (at least in my version), so I had to remove them in the jsp... (and from the jsp point of view I'd have other suggestions but at least those things are easy to change for most of us)

Well, I hope in the future this portlet will improve and if in the meanwhile you could point me at some free (and easy-to-integrate in Liferay!!) external solutions (I've read about konakart, broadleaf, magento... more feedback on these?) that would be great emoticon

P.S. Alexey your portlet seems great! if you think it may work with 6.0.6 version as well, give me a shout emoticon
Paolo Sidoli,修改在10 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

New Member 帖子: 11 加入日期: 08-8-5 最近的帖子
lou cat:
I've read about konakart, broadleaf, magento... more feedback on these?


I work for KonaKart and can give you some more details about the integration with Liferay..

It can be integrated into Liferay in two different ways. The simplest way is as a portlet. You start off with the standard struts2 based storefront application ( demo ), modify it to match your required functionality and design and then run an Ant task (that is provided) to create the portlet which can be imported into Liferay. Here are some examples using this approach:

http://www.2degreesmobile.co.nz
http://www.ou.nl/web/studieaanbod
http://www.leadingtheway.org
http://www.braganca.com.ec
http://www.careum-verlag.ch

The second approach is to use the KonaKart APIs. All functionality in KonaKart is available through APIs (POJO, SOAP, JSON or Javascript / Ajax) so it is relatively easy to create some of your own portlets integrating KonaKart functionality into the portlets by calling the APIs. Here are some examples using this approach:

http://web.telecable.es/
https://store.volkswagen.es/
http://www.bpp.com
http://www.simobil.si
http://www.giftedandtalented.com

This is a recent article on integrating KonaKart with Liferay Building a Social eCommerce solution
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Alexey Kakunin,修改在10 年前。

RE: Liferay as an e-commerce platform: improvements TBD

Liferay Master 帖子: 621 加入日期: 08-7-7 最近的帖子
Hi! Unfortunately for now we support only 6.1 version. Currently preparing to place this plugin into marketplace.