Hi Dmitry.  I always seem to be criticizing you whenever I post here... sorry.

My customer wants an online store. I told them back in the Summer that you had said (on this very thread) "definitely 2011" in release 4.4.  I then saw a small "early 2012" creep in and now you seem to be happy about advocating  3rd party storefronts.

Not surprisingly my customer is not happy that they do not (and will not, it would appear) have the online store promised for this year now...?  Can you give me some absolute dates please?

Sorry, but it's not possible to give any absolute dates in software development. We are dealing with a lot of factors and priorities are moving all the time. Online store is in our short design list but it is still not ready for development. We are very busy with accomplishing our other changes that we've been doing for more than 6 months and this work takes more time than we expected (as always). 

The only thing I can say for sure is that it will not be released until next summer for sure (and we still will have to adjust the date later). I understand your frustration but unfortunately there is nothing we can do here, I apologize for that . 

Chief_Apricot, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. Can you rephrase it?

Hey CarlEd, 

Check out what we did and used:

Site: http://friendsofmichigancrew.org/gear

Application: http://www.fleapay.com

We implemented this in about 15 minutes. It's super fast and easy! 

     I'm not a programmer and this may be out there, but . . .     It seems to me, enabling a storefront is already about 90% solved.  If WA could tweak their program used for the Functional Page for the Events Calendar, it would be there.

o  The big part is renaming everything.  Events becomes Storefront. Register become Buy Now.  etc.

o  Get rid of the calendar view, only view the listings.

o  'Limit registrations' in the event setup screen could be used to identify inventory.  Perhaps WA users could identify specific variables there (size, colour, and quantities of each etc)

o  Add an section (maybe in the form equivalent to the event registration type) where users can identify their shipping costs.  Instead of determining the price based off of a Member-category, perhaps they can select from a previously saved search (like those with Canadian, US, or International addresses)

     Anyway, it's just a thought.  But I honestly think this would be an fairly easy fix.  We're in the process of developing a store with buttons from a different payment processor, though I'd much prefer the ease of doing all of the setup in one place.  Instead, I'm getting ready to cut here, paste there, log in here, go over there etc.

Thanks, I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

Thanks for comments, I appreciate that. The big time investment is not in rewriting program code but careful designing of various workflows from different point of views (visitor vs. admin, digital download vs. physical item, inventory management, etc.)

But we also think that online store has quite separate scenarios in background comparing to events (multiple items can be bought in one transaction, there should be gallery view of items with pictures to easy choose one, admin need an easy way to track new orders and inventory quantity, etc.). 

We too are very exciting an online store especially for digital downloads. We would need to track digital downloads for free publications in addition to those that require a fee.

If there is currently a way to track these downloads please enlighten us. 

Hi!  Wondering if there is any update regarding an estimate when the Store function page will be introduced.  We are VERY anxious to get it up and running. My organization has a very small staff, and we chose Wild Apricot because of how wonderfully integrated everything is.  Not having a store creates a lot of extra administrative work for us. 

Advice for others in our shoes:  we are using Mal's e-commerce. They don't offer a shopping cart Amazon environment, but you can easily place "pay here" buttons on your site. Mal's is a go between with Wild Apricot and Pay Pal.  (We tried to use the Pay Pal widget, but it was intuitive to use - especially now that most of us are used to shopping cart environments.) Mal's basic service is free, which is pretty great.  Again, it's administrative work keeping track of orders, but we will probably stick with this until WA releases the Store function page.

Hi Dmitry.  I agree with an earlier post and have implemented a basic store by utilising the events.  I set up a category called 'shop' and then made an event type page and changed the settings so only 'shop' category events show. 

With the full store functionality not available for another year, is it possible in an earlier release to create a basic store page where you mimic the events and put on those basic changes (e.g. register button changed to purchase, don't require a date, etc).

For anyone who is interested in "plugging in" a store to their WA site, I can recommend ecwid (http://www.ecwid.com/) 

Yes, it means that user have separate shop accounts to their WA accounts, but it is a simple and easy way to have a full-featured shop sitting inside WA.

I am not associated with ecwid in any way, I have just used it for a couple of client sites and to be honest, would also use it on my own WA site if the need arose.

 It can be implemented by way of a couple of lines of code and is easily styled and configured.

 Hope this helps some people :-)

Cheers