DavidP

@hfxracing I am going to try an update on one of my sites when 1.0.4 is released. There's really no point in trying to address stuff in 1.0.3 as there's hundreds of fixes between the two versions so whatever I try might be affected by the differences. When 1.0.4 is out I'll debug my payment gateway on the site that doesn't see many sales. My other two sites do get a lot more sales so I'll be ensuring all issues are resolved before I go live on them two.

Have you thought about putting a PayPal donation button on ThirtyBees forums / website itself? A lot of people don't like the idea of a signed up service like Patreon or whatever because however you paint it it is a subscription service. A donation button may bring in extra cash to support the recurring monthly costs, after all the crowdfunding for Elastic Search was a good success.

@wakabayashi good attitude! Wish I could understand the PS/TB logic to try updates but my software engineering days were back when we have defined real-time systems, all this web stuff nowadays has so many inter-dependencies, one small change can break something on x.x.x.x.x. of an obscure browsers lol

@ssimard I'd watch some of those titles, given the international visibility you're getting. I bring to question the Brathwaite - Isabelle Masse one.

@30knees I don't have a trade account or use one of them modules, I was mentioning that the VAT one does exist, sorry if it came across as I did. I messed around with the accounts but had issues with tax. TB/PS isn't designed to work in the way you want so you've got to fudge something in. We work on the basis that the customer claims the VAT back rather than giving them the discount up front due to the limitations and we try to give them the info they need. What I do is put the VAT number on the invoice and on our product page I also show the price ex VAT below the inc VAT. I did try out a module to do this but it was terrible, it didn't work with products that had combinations and didn't take into account discounts. In the end I did it myself by modifying the product.tpl, product.css, product.js files. It becomes too complex trying to get that pricing inc / excl into the cart and the checkout - the module we tried couldn't do it and the developer gave us a refund. As you've said previously, the customer groups section needs reworking with logic as when to apply / not apply taxes. You then need some control based on the users location and their VAT number to activate this logic. You can do the VAT validation with a module but you can't do the rules on tax application in one group.

@anima I feel your pain, I'm no dev, just a tinkerer but we'll be able to either resolve our payment gateway issue internally or buy a module that is supported by TB. However, I agree, it's too risky at the moment to jump ship to either TB or PS 1.7 and are still stuck on PS1.6. I've looked at every alternative out there and unfortunately the best option at the moment is to ride it out on PS1.6 - better the devil you know :). I'm hoping TB 1.0.4 is going to be suitable especially as PrestaShop dropped a big bombshell this month stating they're ditching symfony 2.8 in favour of 3.4 - this basically means 1.7.3 is pointless taking up as it's all change for 1.7.4, which will be the first opportunity to try stuff out if and when it lands. However the PS team are for want of a better word 'hackers playing around' who don't care about the merchant impact of their product, they only care about making money from the module store. I therefore have little confidence in PS1.7 ever being a suitable replacement. TB is the way to go but it just needs more support. Before you jump to another platform try out the TB 1.0.4 and get your dev to update the payment gateway. When the RC2 comes out I intend to install it and give it a thorough testing because we have to have a replacement for PS in the next few months and as it stands there really isn't anything better than TB (or PS1.6) in the open source arena.

@anima be careful of Magento. Sure the M1 support has been extended to June 2020 but it's not being developed for anymore. As for M2, Magento have fixed the mistake they made with M1 by ensuring the M2 Commerce (which has a hefty price tag circa $25k+ per year) has many features a company requires, especially for B2B, and not included these in the M2 Open Source version. Elastic Search is one of the things not in the free version of M2. If you're going to go Magento 2 Open Source, which is still full of bugs, you'll need to pay a lot for modules. The big problem on Magento is that it now has investors and shareholders who want money so they've got very little interest in supporting an open source version other than as a means to move them people onto their paid version. They've only extended the support on M1 because they don't want to risk losing potential future customers moving from M1 to other platforms. As I mentioned in another post, Thirty Bees could do with listing the supported payment gateways; if you could identify a payment gateway you use on PrestaShop you could contact the developers to find out if it'll be supported on TB.

@30knees if you're going to do this for B2B you need a module that validates the VAT number to ensure someone doesn't just make up a VAT number. You also need this to be a trade account rather than guest to set up the tax free status for them. We do well over 90% of our sales B2B on PrestaShop and having our company VAT number on the invoice is sufficient for the company we deal with to claim back their VAT. Going down the route of full B2B isn't something PS or TB is set up for, it's a bit of a fudge at best. You're going to need dedicated modules for B2B. Take a look at OroCommerce or Magento 2 Commerce - those are the features you need to find modules for on TB, if someone out there can sell these modules on TB then it'll push TB into a serious contender against the big boys that are charging upwards of $25k a year :)

@alwayspaws for a non-programmer wait on the RC2 as taking RC1 you'd have to apply all of the 100+ fixes post RC1 yourself. Ideally you should wait on the TB updater for the official 1.0.4 release.

@mockob good luck on that one, it's something that should be as standard but it's not. The whole cart rule logic is extremely basic, one of the most annoying is allowing free shipping for a product but not being able to exclude that rule from other products, such as when you add a product to the cart that the rule doesn't apply to - you still get free shipping because you've got a product in the cart that's applicable. You can hack CartRule.php but ideally it'd be nice to have some AND OR XOR NOT logic in the rules to build up compound inclusion / exclusion rules. Unfortunately that'd be a re-write of the core logic.

@bzndk My SagePay issue is reported from SagePay so I have to debug error logs and form submissions. Yup the list would require people using TB to list what they use but a survey of TB users would be good for that.

@lesley that's good to know. I think I also get a discount from them from my contribution to the Elastic Search module :)

@bzndk seems PS all round from my experience is crap modules - of the few we've bought we've had to ask for refunds on a couple as they didn't do what they claimed they would. My company has used SagePay since about 2007 apparently, going back to old Salesforce days, and so don't want to change that especially given that Stripe takes 7 - 10 days to get your money from them. I'd looked at CloudSwipe but they don't want to pay a monthly fee for it. Also the fact SagePay is a UK based company they're happier dealing with it than a US based one, partly due to the fact if they get problems they can ring them during office hours. The fees are fine though the cost is higher than Stripe due to the monthly fees. It does though have the added benefit of taking PayPal from within the system so you don't need to install two modules for it and PayPal. SagePay is old school that for the most part just works (except the Black Friday 2017 blip lol) and has good customer support; if you get a failed payment you can find out within minutes what went wrong, even whilst you've got the customer on the phone. I could probably fix the SagePay issues myself but it'd be handy for TB to provide a list of the supported gateways as for the uninitiated it does seem it's Stripe and PayPal are the only ones supported.

@bzndk unfortunately I use the PS own module on 3 stores, have paid for it 3 times. I don't expect my licences to cover TB support and I don't know where I'd stand legally on trying to use them on TB, part of the reason I didn't dig more into debugging them as I wasn't sure if I was allowed to. I've had bad experience with third-party devs on PS so went with PS made ones as that seemed a more trusted source lol. Maybe I'll just have to investigate in writing a SagePay interface to get round the issue. However, showing more supported gateways would be handy as I didn't know about those you mentioned until you brought them up.

@bzndk yup I've tried the module out in test mode and it has some issue with the form submission. TBH I've not tried thorough debugging to find out what's wrong but it does work on my PS stores. I don't know where I stand though on licencing, given I paid for the module under PS whether trying to use it under TB would void that. With regards to those other modules, maybe we should have a section under supported modules to show supported Payment Gateways or even on the front features page - something like that boosts confidence in the product. I'm guessing all those with active shops then aren't forum users lol.

I think one of the blocking issues for the uptake on an ecommerce platform is what payment gateways are supported, especially for those switching from other platforms where they've got the merchant accounts already set up. I know you've got a PayPal and Stripe gateway module on the go but here in the UK a lot of companies use the likes of WorldPay and SagePay. Sure Stripe may offer better facilities and costs but you've also got to look at the point that some companies don't want to switch what they've been with for years, especially when what they've got has just worked without problems. I myself have gone round the whole gateway issue many times with my company and previous companies I've worked for and as it stands now I'm probably going to have to make our PrestaShop SagePay module work with TB if we go TB because PrestaShop certainly won't provide any support in making their module work with TB! It might be worth surveying users as to what gateways they use on their current systems to see if this is a wider issue and also what could be blocking them from their uptake of TB because there seems to be a lot of interested people but not as many uptakes from those with established platforms. From the reported 10,000 users of TB (you mentioned it in a blog) I get the impression from these forums that there's maybe 3 or 4 people who are actually running a live TB store that sells stuff. If that's the case why are those other 9,996 people not running TB for their shop?

@drmasterchief for most companies in the UK it will be sufficient to have a dedicated GDPR page detailing exactly what is and isn't saved. You don't need to edit the code to comply with it, you just need to tell the customer what is being saved and how it is used.

Is the RC2 going to be released soon or is it still in testing? I looked at the commits for the 1.0.x branch and it seems to have 95 commits since the RC1 release so wanted to check if the RC2 would include all of them as well and if so when. Thanks.

@wakabayashi this is a feature that should be part of the core and not a module. Having the ability to force the customer to make a choice is good as too many customers go with the default, not realising they've got to actually select the one they want and then complain 'that's not what I ordered'. It should be a toggle on the product page admin with 'Use Default Combination YES/NO'. It doesn't need to be anything complicated. If you select NO then put up that message that you've shown. Making this a module just adds an unnecessary layer of complication and something else to update when the core updates.

Hi, We're thinking of setting up a site for a new territory early next year and are unsure about TB or PS1.7 but thought we might try out TB as a test; if it goes wrong then it's a new line so it's not impacting our main websites. Anyhow, to do this we'd have to use CloudSwipe as we're stuck with using the SagePay payments. Has anyone got experience of CloudSwipe with TB and if so does it work OK or are there any problems? Thanks, David

@mdekker I don't understand any of that text lol. I agree it's VERY hard to get anything changed on there but you can and some of it does stick. I see approx 500-1000 hits from Wiki to one of my sites a month, which is why I still see benefit in it. @lesley I wonder if it was that guy who had his posts deleted.

@dprophitjr ah OK. I only picked up on it when I was looking at the PrestaShop page in relation to one of their recent blog posts that generated a bit of flaming and someone linked to the PrestaShop wiki with regards to Freemium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Inetbiz it's on the bottom about Tag placed on user:Inetbiz requesting that it be marked for speedy deletion.

This page no longer exists and the user inetbiz has been marked for deletion for violation of wikipedia rules. I noticed he changed the PrestaShop page on 28th November from Free to Freemium. It might be worth getting that page updated.

@briljander with regards to PS being on shaky ground, unfortunately the future of PS 1.6 I think has already passed even though they're stating support till October 2018. 1.6.1.18 still isn't out and it's been about 3 months since 1.6.1.17 came out on 9th September. Also all versions above 1.6.1.12 have introduced some serious problems with stock management, volume discounts, broken forms, broken swift mail clients and numerous others (I only listed the ones that have direct impact on my stores). PS just don't care anymore about 1.6. I've got three stores, a 1.6.1.6, 1.6.1.10 and 1.6.1.11 - I'd like to upgrade them all to 1.6.1.12 but I can't as the one-click won't allow me. I've been stuck in limbo for many months hoping TB would be good enough to use. The issue I have with TB is the worry about it's future support and direction; at the moment my stores work but I couldn't honestly say that'd be the case if I went TB. I see all the issues people have on here with payments and emails and those sort of problems would kill my stores, it's just too big a risk to take. If you take a look at https://trends.builtwith.com/shop/PrestaShop it gives you an idea that a lot of people are jumping ship on PrestaShop. Here's the one for TB https://trends.builtwith.com/shop/thirty-bees. Whilst not being very accurate, they do give you an idea of trends of movement. TB need to address core issues, funding and roadmap - for all the for/against Patreon or paid subscription the point is that right now the funding isn't there so the full time support isn't there and people are leaving PrestaShop in droves but not to TB - first quarter of next year many PrestaShop merchants will be be evaluating their platforms and looking to switch to something new and I worry TB will miss out on the exodus.