Trying to come up with the best solution for a wholesale/drop-shipping store..

[sounds]

Hello,

I have some stuff going on in my head, thought I would share it, maybe some people here have worked on similar projects.

I've been testing a few different shopping systems, something tells me I should have started with manegto.

I'm use to working with joomla sites and magento looks to be more along those lines than the carts I've tested.

I've built presta stores, and I think presta is really nice to use, but certain payment modules didn't work 

for some payment gateways that were being used by the stores, that's when I started searching again.

I then tried abante and really enjoy working with it but seems a bit new and not as many extensions.

I don't build extensions but can customize css, sometimes there's not what I need and I can't build it myself.

Like if a theme has a basic menu structure and I can't really advance on that, I'd look for a new menu extension,

What if the system you're using doesn't have any other menu extensions, get what I'm saying?

So I think it's time to install magento and give it a try.

What I am hoping to do is build an online store for electronics and new technologies, gadgets etc.

Sort of like the product line you would see on china vasion, we were using them for drop shipping services,

But the problem there is returns, if in the event of a faulty product, I'd rather have customers return their

goods to a company in europe, so I'm checking out esource for wholesalers/dropshippers in europe.

I have read some documents about importing products automatically via csv or xlm files, don't know much about

that yet, haven't tried it before, but I'd like to know if you had multiple companies drop-shipping products for you,

Can you add them all into Magento?

Can't think of anything else right now.. any info appreciated

Thanks!

[Melvyn Sopacua]

Hello and welcome to Magento.

Magento's strength and weakness is that it is a base system. There are very few cases where people can do without at least one or two extensions. But because it's built for extensibility, Magento's community has provided a vast ecosystem of options and themes.

Some tips:

• When looking for a theme, one easily arrives at Theme Forest and similar collection sites. They can look highly configurable and beautiful, but you have to be very aware that a lot of them have performance issues. Check carefuly for refund options and be sure to test the performance of the theme with an increasing number of (virtual) users. Load times should not increase significantly with each user.
  Tools: Blazemeter | LoadImpact
• Hosting is important. Just because some company claims to specialize in Magento hosting doesn't make it so. Ask around in the community. See which hosting companies contribute to the community.
• Magento has a number of import solutions readily available. They vary in speed, but turning all indexes to manual for the duration of the import greatly increases performance, no matter the underlying technique used. Imports aren't the best way to manage your products. You're still keeping tabs on your different suppliers and repair services and mistakes are easy to make, but hard to explain to consumers. I know that at least the Boost My Shop extension has support for returns.
  Research: Integrated ERP | Open ERP Bridge | Mamut Integration (SBS ERP)
• Menu's come in various shapes and sizes. If you have basic HTML/CSS skills then by far Pronav is the most flexible, as it doesn't try to impose mark-up on you, but instead gives you places to add it to. There's also menu builders around. I haven't seen one just yet that has good performance.
• Choose your PSP carefully. An hour outage can cost you more than a monthly fee. Always try to support the payment method that's prefered by the country and at least one method of payment after delivery.
• There's a good thread here dealing with what's important for a new shop.

If you have more specific questions, feel free to ask.

[Magecom]

Hi @sounds,

Magento doesn't have drop-shipping out of the box but I'd recommend checking this dropshipping extension. It's not the cheapest one but the features offered are quite powerful. Hope it helps.

Magecom | Magento e-Commerce Development
www.magecom.net