Because in the documentation example is not written very well, I’ve tried like this:
but this returns the info of category 5 for the default store.
The proper call is:
hope that helps someone.
It’s very common practice the administrators to get notification mail when a new order is placed on the shop. Here is how to activate this feature in Magento for free (there is paid Admin Notification Module as well):
Log in into admin area, then go to System->Configuration menu. Scroll down to Sales section and click on the Sales Emails and select the first section Orders. Enter your admin e-mail in the field “Send Order Email Copy To”.
And here comes the tricky one 🙂 Select the option “Separate email” from the “Send Order Email Copy Method” field. I don’t know why, but if it’s selected “Bcc”, the e-mail to the admin wasn’t send.
It’s possible that this is fixed in the versions above 1.2.x, but I haven’t tested.
hope this helps someone.
Few weeks ago I’ve been contacted from Packt Publishing in order to review their new book Magento Beginners Guide and because I had experience with that e-commerce platform, I decided to accept the offer.
Magento Beginners Guide is a new book that covers the process of building an online store using the Magento e-commerce solution. It’s written by William Rice and is focused on the main key features of Magento to setup a unique on-line store and customize its appearance with the help of examples.
This book is for anyone who wants to create an online store using Magento. If you are a non-technical person and are discouraged by the complexity of this powerful e-commerce application, this book is ideal for you.
Magento is the world’s most evolved e-commerce solution which runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. From one installation, you can control multiple multilingual storefronts, all sharing customer and product information. Magento’s templates, themes and extensions gives the possibility to create an unique and powerful solution for e-commerce.
The book provides a step-by-step approach to building a simple and effective on-line store. It covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through the installation, configuration, adding categories and product attributes, filling your store with products from various types, payment configuration, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.
Readers will be able to present and sell products in groups, sets, they can offer discounts based on quantities along with accepting various payments such as PayPal, CC, Checks, Bank transfers, Payment on delivery and many other payment gateways. Along with connecting to shippers such as UPS, FedEx, and USPS they will learn to apply tax rules to different shipping addresses and different types of products.
The publisher kindly provide two chapters from the book, so you can get a clue of the style in it.
If you like the book you can order it from here:
Magento: Beginner’s Guide
€27.89 save 10%
My first approach for this post was to explain my first impressions from Magento Commerce, but I decided to explain how I managed to create a Retail/Wholesale solution required for a current project.
The client want to have a shop where regular customers to be able to see products with their retail price, while Wholesale partners to see the prices with ? discount. The extra condition: retail and wholesale prices hasn’t mathematical dependency. So, a product could be $100 for retail and $50 for whole sale and another one could be $60 retail and $50 wholesale. And of course retail users should not be able to see wholesale prices at all.
Basically, I will explain what I did step-by-step, but in order to understand what I mean, you should be familiar with the basics of Magento.
1. Creating two magento websites, stores and views
(Magento meaning of website of course) It’s done from from System->Manage Stores. The result is:
Website | Store | View
————————————————
Retail->Retail->Default
Wholesale->Wholesale->Default
Both sites using the same category/product tree
2. Setting the price scope
in System->Configuration->Catalog->Catalog->Price set drop-down to Website. Now you could enter prices per store/website and they could be totally different.
3. Get some plugins
Get following plugins from Magento Connect and install them from admin: System->Magento Connect->Magento Connect Manager:
Netzarbeiter_LoginCatalog – User need to login in order to see the store (it will be used for Wholesale site)
Netzarbeiter_CustomerActivation – User need to be approved from site admins in order to be able to login to the site. (again it will be used for wholesale site)
Both plugins need to be activated for wholesale only. Because they are activated when they are installed, you need to disable them for Default/Retail website and to leave enabled to Wholesale. You should know that distinction between sites in System->Configuration is done from top left corner of the config window.
First plugin is enabled/disabled from: System > Configuration > Catalog > Login only catalog
Second one: System > Configuration > Customer > Customer Activation.
4. Setting separate url for Wholesale
Now wholesales need to have separate urls, so regular users will access http://domain.com/, while wholesale will access http://domain.com/wholesale/. I found this solution in the Magento Forum: Thread.
So, following the instructions I created directory wholesale/ and copied .htaccess and index.php files from the root directory. Modifications in the index.php are the same as in the Forum:
Mage::run(); become Mage::run(‘wholesale’);
and
$mageFilename = ‘app/Mage.php’; become $mageFilename = ‘../app/Mage.php’;
5. Change the wholesale paths from the admin
From System->Configuration (select Wholesale website)->General->Web and change the paths by adding wholesale/ (it’s also mentioned in the forum thread).
6. Adding products to both websites
When adding products, you should mark them visible for both sites. This is done from Product page->Websites tab.
That’s it! Now on http://domain.com/ users will see full catalog, they can login without Admin approval and prices will be retail, while on http://domain.com/wholesale only users registered as wholesale and activated from admin will be able to see catalog with wholesale prices.
And this was the easiest part … the rest is to import about 2000 products from the current osCommerce store, and to add another 4000 from the client’s ERP system. After this on regular basis to update prices and quantities from ERP system. 🙂
Hopefully this will help someone.
