Using the Commerce Kickstart distribution to sell non-standard products

Question

I've been using the Commerce Kickstart distribution for physical products and it work great.

Now I find myself in a situation which could be the common for many of us.

I need to start a new project where the product to sell is a Parcel Delivery Service. Very similar to this one: http://www.parcel2go.com/

Then, from my point of view, the process is:

1) The user enters required data (Collection, Destination, Weight, etc)

2) Clicks the button "quote"

3) System generates a single product with a calculated price (based on the data entered by the user)

4) The user add the product to the cart and follows the checkout in the standard way

The difference is that there is no previously created products in this site. I think that there is just one product which I can call "Delivery Service" but this product has no price. This price will be generated on the fly by a formula using the data entered by the user.

Is this the right approach?

Can I use the Commerce Kickstart distribution for this case? If so, which other module could be useful for this case?

Answer 1

Not really an answer, but only my point of view.

I would create a dummy item without price and add the calculated price to the carrier fees. You can trigger almost every action you need from Rules.

• Add FOO item to cart.
• Add the transport fee to the order.

This rules are already there in Kickstart, you will only have to tune the Carrier fee calculation rules to fit your use case. Of course I don't think Kickstart is designed with selling services in mind but I don't think you are going to find any major problem in going this way. Think of a store with only one product that ships worlwide with different transport fees. The carrier can well be a variation type of your product.

My 2 cents.