multi vendor shipping / drop shipping / vendor mall

[David M. Graham]

EOS is based on CRE Loaded B2B.  B2B is definitely in its future.  It is suitable for use by retailers also, because of our reimplementation of the price break structure.

Multiple vendor or warehouse shipping is planned.  We do not plan to reuse the osCommerce contribution as CRE did, but to update / modify the core shipping system to handle freight and shipping more effectively.

Our development team is currently myself and Tom O'Neill (zip1).  The focus on code development has largely on code cleanup and organization with reimplementation of some key systems.   Code consolidation has been a high priority, with several content management systems already collapsed into what used to be the page manager.  Quite a bit of operational streamlining in other words.

We've also put some effort into creating a community based code development infrastructure.  It is our belief that having store owners, customers, hosts and support vendors involved from the beginning of the development cycle will result in a cart which is more powerful and usable.

Open design is supported by the use of our Wiki to build design documents in which the community can participate.  Open Development is possible through our subversion repository setup. 

We have some other features to implement in order to support the process - including the ability to vote on posts so that we can get community feedback that is quantifiable for use in development planning.

There is no specific plan for a "vendor mall" type distribution.  That said, we do have a commitment to being branch friendly and to continuing to collaborate with branch focused teams in maintaining a common core in true Open Source fashion.

[vtjballeng]

I currently run several oscommerce MVS sites with a HEAVY level of customization.  The base code of our cart however goes back to 2004 and we don't have the manpower to overhaul osc completely.  So we are looking at some more modern and secure options.  Zencart and CREloaded are at the top of our list but Zencart does not support MVS or any similar system.  In looking at CREloaded, we are concerned that they may not be properly evaluating the code being implemented (written by others) for security and optimized function.

With all that in mind, we saw Eos Online Merchant and are curious about any development work ongoing related to MVS or something similar.  Is this part of the Eos path at this time?  How is the development team organized and how many people are at work on the project?  We have a very large amount of customization that we would like to bring into a cart system. Hopefully that cart system has a future and will be quick, reliable, secure and provide the best possible customer experience while giving our vendors all the data necessary to fulfill orders.

There are also a lot of other features in the B2B version of CREloaded that we would like to utilize, how much of these sorts of additions are planned for Eos as a package?