Ecommerce software with quoting facility

use quotes to checkout like a normal shopping cart

[mingis]

Hi there,

I’m in the process of setting up a new ecommerce store – one of the most important pieces of functionality will be to allow customers to request quotes.

Ideally I’d like to have this setup exactly like the shopping cart e.g. customer adds products to cart and then request the quote at the checkout.

The administrator can then login and review the quote, change prices, attach documents and add/remove items. Once the quote has been created the administrator can then send it to the client who can (for example) click on a link and pay for the quote online.

Does anyone know of an ecommerce solution that’s capable of this?

I’d be most grateful for any advice.

Cheers.

[mattia]

Hi,
The ecommerce solution we use has an estimate module.
Basically you, as the admin create the "estimate" for the user (who has to be a registered user already) and send him the quote/estimate by email.
The estimate module can let you add new products and add discount rate the way you want it. The discounts can even be based on the type of customer (useful for B2B selling)

Anyway, the user can manage the list of estimate in his account and pay or delete the one he wants.

However, even if complete, I fel a little different from what you relly wanted. I mean you wanted to have the customer to fill his cart first...

Well in this case the estimate module lets you "sort of" fill out the cart for him and give it a name - the estimate ID name....
is that what you're looking for as a feature?

best,
Marc

[edited by: lorax at 12:30 pm (utc) on Nov 11, 2011]
[edit reason] fixed typo [/edit]

[mchowdhary]

I believe NetSuite has the B2B Quote module.

[mingis]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your responses, I will certainly check them out - in the meantime I've also done a bit of research of my own and found the following solutions:

X-cart - has a plugin which allows customers to create a quote from their shopping cart. It doesn't look particularly pretty but I'm sure it could be improved upon:

[bcsengineering.com...]

However the authors of this plugin advise me that most of the source code is encrypted so unless it does exactly what you want you will have to pay for custom development.

Magento - has a couple of options for creating and managing customer quotes.

This one which seems a bit over-priced and complicated:
[cart2quote.com...]

And this one which is much more affordable and easy to use:
[magentocommerce.com...]

At this point I'm tempted to go with Magento, but thanks again for your input I'll compare them with what I've found.

Cheers.

[mattia]

@mingis,
Thank for your reply and pointers.

For us it does not make sense that THE CUSTOMER would be the one DOING THE QUOTE.
It is a nonsense!

The customer usually does not know what it takes to produce THIS THING!
example:
- build this system
- catering (organize this wedding)
- etc...

the customer should only have to explain with few words what their end goal is and the admin in return will create the estimate.

If the customer has to select the products then what's the point?

The estimate module we use is allowing us to PRE-FILL the customer shopping cart for a particular project.

The customer only has to go to his account, select the corresponding estimateID and pay for it (or challenge its price of course),
So he would save a lot of time on selecting himself all the products and add them one by one to the cart.
Sometime, it may just be 3 products, but in other cases it could be 10/30 or even 100 products...

That same estimate module can let the store admin apply very custom discount rate on each products (not just a discount on the whole bill).
Also, the estimate feature we have is all code opened so you have full access to the code.

Anyway, good luck with your finding and decisions.

best,
Marc