mgaccess Posted January 9, 2015 Share Posted January 9, 2015 Hi, it has been a couple of years since I've used WHMCS. I had a service oriented business (online backup) that I have since sold and WHMCS was awesome for that! I am going to start selling a few physical products online (and with that comes shipping, returns, etc), and was wondering if WHMCS is still a good choice? I heard some things about OpenCart but I am not familiar with it. I just remember I enjoyed the feature rich and flexible aspects WHMCS. Any thoughts, or anyone doing this? Thank You. ~Mike 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kian Posted January 9, 2015 Share Posted January 9, 2015 (edited) Hi, 2 years ago I developed for a client of mine a module that allowed him to sell physical products directly from WHMCS. There were additional product pages and categories like for example "Hard Disks" with "Samsung", "Corsair" etc. inside, "Softwares" with "Adobe", "Symantec" etc. inside. There was a real working stock control with relative notification on frontend like "Out of stock", "Last item" (...), and while ordering it was also possible to specify a different shipping address - it was added as additional contact on WHMCS. The entire system was multi-language, all URLs were rewritten for SEO like "mywebite.com/hard-disk/samsung-c130-1tb-hd" and it was also possible to upload pics for every product. Physical products on WHMCS were all inside Products/Services. To make it short from my experience it's doable with WHMCS instead of using a lot more complicated stand-alone system like Magento or OpenCart. Edited January 9, 2015 by Kian 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex - Arvixe Posted January 10, 2015 Share Posted January 10, 2015 It is possible but I recommend you opt for a solution that was designed for this - PrestaShop or OpenCart etc You will have to play a lot and change things with WHMCS to fit your business needs (delivery with tracking numbers for carriers just for an example). If you really wanted this then I guess you could start building some modules but it might be costly. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unkown Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 I really don;t see the point using WHMCS for just selling goods like that. There are lots of shopping cart systems that are made just for that and would do a better good... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kian Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 (edited) From my experience, unless if you are not selling tons of physical products, I prefer to use WHMCS for a lot of reasons: - You don't have to invent a way to solve double invoicing problems - WHMCS & the external ecommerce - You don't have to spend a lot of time to make them look similar with the same graphic - You don't have to maintain, use and manage another system especially if it's an evil system like Magento - You can keep all awesome functions and stuff you developed for WHMCS for physical products too (Phone verification, payment gateways, reports, graphs, statistics, automations...). If you use an external ecommerce you'll probably need to reinvent the wheel porting all your stuff there - What about cross selling? You could create promotions that involve domains, hosting accounts and, for example, an hard drive or NAS. You can't do the same so easily with 2 separate systems - Why do you want to force your clients to register on both system? It's a mess. Oh yeah, you could create an integration but we all know how hard/messy it could be - Probably today you only need a WHMCS expert but tomorrow, when you start using a system like Magento, you'll probably need an additional one. I stop here. I could provide tens of other reasons. Of course this is just my point of view. I play with WHMCS and Magento and damn know how time consuming are both so I prefer one beast instead of two Edited January 11, 2015 by Kian 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foka Posted January 12, 2015 Share Posted January 12, 2015 I would agree with @Kian, For selling a few physical products while your primary business is still services two separate systems will be a headache. Over the years, while spending most of our times on WHMCS we are too much familiar with it that even doing a modification seems easy than going for another system. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unkown Posted January 12, 2015 Share Posted January 12, 2015 I would agree if he was going to do any hosting or domains.. But from the looks of the post he is not and that is why I say a cart script is better... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex - Arvixe Posted January 14, 2015 Share Posted January 14, 2015 From my experience, unless if you are not selling tons of physical products, I prefer to use WHMCS for a lot of reasons: - You don't have to invent a way to solve double invoicing problems - WHMCS & the external ecommerce - You don't have to spend a lot of time to make them look similar with the same graphic - You don't have to maintain, use and manage another system especially if it's an evil system like Magento - You can keep all awesome functions and stuff you developed for WHMCS for physical products too (Phone verification, payment gateways, reports, graphs, statistics, automations...). If you use an external ecommerce you'll probably need to reinvent the wheel porting all your stuff there - What about cross selling? You could create promotions that involve domains, hosting accounts and, for example, an hard drive or NAS. You can't do the same so easily with 2 separate systems - Why do you want to force your clients to register on both system? It's a mess. Oh yeah, you could create an integration but we all know how hard/messy it could be - Probably today you only need a WHMCS expert but tomorrow, when you start using a system like Magento, you'll probably need an additional one. I stop here. I could provide tens of other reasons. Of course this is just my point of view. I play with WHMCS and Magento and damn know how time consuming are both so I prefer one beast instead of two I'm not seeing anything above about having an active WHMCS install for certain products? It looks like he wants to start something new having sold his previous company. Without any other company then all these points are not really relevant and a system designed for physical products would be much better. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mgaccess Posted January 15, 2015 Author Share Posted January 15, 2015 Thank you for the replies guys (sorry for the delay in responding). @Alex, you are correct, I am starting from scratch and do not currently have a WHMCS systems. If I did, @Kian would have valid points for sure. I actually forgot about the tracking number aspect - good point 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex - Arvixe Posted January 17, 2015 Share Posted January 17, 2015 Thank you for the replies guys (sorry for the delay in responding). @Alex, you are correct, I am starting from scratch and do not currently have a WHMCS systems. If I did, @Kian would have valid points for sure. I actually forgot about the tracking number aspect - good point You're welcome. Which platform did you end up with? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mgaccess Posted January 19, 2015 Author Share Posted January 19, 2015 @Alex, none yet. I am going to evaluate Opencart. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unkown Posted January 19, 2015 Share Posted January 19, 2015 opencart is good, it will do everything you need and then some... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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