Question

We are trying to do something interesting but challenging:

We have a couple thousand products listed on our B2C site (non-Magento), & are considering moving the site to Magento for a variety of reasons. The product pages provide detailed information about these products. Our user base would now like us to provide local information about retail stores where they can buy these products; the information required would be Retail outlet name, address, zip, phone, & a Google-map display (this last is optional).

In the front-end, each product detail page will display relevant retailers depending on the product AS WELL AS depending on the user’s zip. Each user will see upto 5 nearby retailers.

My question is: how best can we set up this in Magento so that we can:

1. map products to retail_outlets, the way magento allows for mapping of products to categories. Products & outlets will have a many-to-many relationship, & we are looking for something that will be easy to maintain.
2. Map user’s zips to the retailer info.

We are open to using magento 1.7, if that is a better fit.

Thanks in advance.
-TM

Answer 1

This is not the right place for this question as it is not related to programming and does not have code samples and is too general 🙁 read the FAQ please

but in general you need:

1. add a product attribute (multiselect) with all your retail_outlets and add a possible retailers to a product
2. ask user to input a zip if he has not jet . you can get this from quote->getShippingAddress()->getPostcode(); if your user is
   registered or something
3. on detail page query out your retailers by zip. This will need you to implement Geo/Spatial Search with MySQL.