What extension would you like to see developed?

[f r i s]

The "Popularity score" on the Magento market place does not tell us what NEW extensions businesses would like to see.

Tell us what you'd like to see next. 

What are your current pain points?

What would really help your business?

[jehanshaw]

I would love to see a drop shipping module that will handle multiple suppliers/manufacturers, then when an order is placed, it will e-mail the relevant manufacturers of the products they need to send out - (one per manufacturer for each that has items in the basket).

Also handle delivery charges so if one item from each of two manufacturers is ordered, then two seperate elements of delivery charge can be brought together.

Also it woudl be helpful to have a way to give a manufacturer a login so they can edit their own products and see their own orders.

That's all

[crabjack]

Funny - just an hour before this was posted I posted asking about an extension (or developer) that could help me with FedEx shipping. I am looking for a way to post estimated delivery dates (or times, depending on the shipping option). For example, next to the shipping option on the checkout page (I use OneStepCheckout) might be "SmartPost  $6.06 - 3-8 days"; and "2 Day $15.03 - 06/05/15". This would give my customers more information by which to select a shipping option. 

Then I would like the Ground options to reflect if the order is being sent to a residential (SmartPost & HomeDelivery) or a commercial address (Ground), with no input from the customer. The way it is I can have it one way or the other. I can configure Magento to allow residential deliveries (which takes the Ground option away from my commercial customers. If I disallow residential deliveries, my customers choose ground, and the actuall shipping costs are $3 - $4 more than they are charged, and I loose.

Thanks,

John

[Melvyn Sopacua]

Several:

1. For myself: One that shows store owners in the back-office, which modules the biggest resource hogs are on the frontend.
2. For some of our clients: ability to manage purchase orders and with it easier stock management
3. For merchants worldwide: ability to share customer data (anonysmously) into an open comparison matrix that can be queried for behavior patterns, products that sell together, newsletter engagement etc.

All I can think of for now And good question!

[f r i s]

He @jehanshaw, thanks for the suggestion.

Looks like drop-ship is on the rise.

To give us some more context, do you already have site on which you wish to implement this? If so, would you mind sharing a link?

What kind of goods are being drop-shipped in your use-case?

[f r i s]

@crabjack

Great idea!

[f r i s]

@Melvyn Sopacua

Number 1 and 3 are very useful, but very ambitious targets.

Re 1: there are certainly tools that help pinpoint bottlenecks of performance. But they tend to require a developer to install them and interpret the results. A dashboard with green and red performance lights next to each Magento extension on your site would be lovely, but is technically not within easy reach.

[f r i s]

There's this http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/unirgy-dropship.html ... if you have $950 in your back pocket....

[Melvyn Sopacua]

@f r i sNot as hard as you think. New Relic already has this data for APM transaction traces (but is a bad choice, since they only get generated in the case of problems). Looking at the Insights API, it looks possible, but I don't have access to a sufficienty large Magento store to see what data can be queried and calculated.

Blackfire.io looks like a good candidate as well, if they're able to bring down their footprint or could work sample-based. But resources aren't just performance/time-based. Storage footprints for the database is a nice metric, that's easily collectable, as are number of cache invalidations - that real time stock you wanted - how does it impact your store?

From the positive side, you can also determine a modules' added value, if they interact with the user. Which features are used, which are totally skipped. Think for instance layered navigation filters. Which do people use most? Is it category dependant or is it dependant on a trait of your products that crosses several categories and does a small adjustment in categorization mean you can ditch a filter in a number of other categories?

The smaller merchants that are at that tipping point of breaking through, they have very litle data on their shop behavior and their customers and yet ROI is crucial here. The shops I've seen move on steadily or even with spurts, they're the ones that have surrounded themselves with specialists in marketing, seo and technology interpreting data for them.

Anyway, technically there may be some challenges, but on the other hand - data analysis is a hot topic and will be for a while, so I'm counting on innovations there too.

[Shimon2]

I would like to see a FedEx Shipping extension. If it handled Drop Ship that would be great, however just plain FedEx would be enough.

The current FedEx module can not handle simple things that are available in most other platforms.

1) Commercial and Residential Delivery

2) Free Shipping for Continental US

3) Multiple free shipping options.

4) Shipping location by brand or manufacturer