I’m currently scoping out Umbraco as the potential platform for a website I’m working on. The client essentially wants an e-commerce site, except, instead of the normal shopping cart/checkout functions, they want logged in users to be able to add items to ‘scrapbooks’, which they can have more than one of, with different names. When they are happy with the scrapbook, it needs to be able to do some quote calculations and then submit the results to a Salesforce system, rather than taking payment. They also want a custom recommendation engine where you can pick one product, and find similar ones.
I’ve looked at some e-commerce solutions, but because the checkout is such a core part of these, it seems they would require quite a hack-job to replace them. So now instead, I’m looking at using Umbraco for the product catalogue, and building the other functionality onto it.
I’m not looking for a complete guide on how to do this or anything, but I am wondering if someone can let me know if Umbraco is even a good choice for doing all this? I’m slowly getting my head round how it works, but haven’t quite got enough insight to see how I can integrate it with my own code yet. For example, presumably I would need to create a new doctype to hold product information, but is there an easy way of hydrating a ‘Product’ model in my MVC project so I can add behaviour to these models?
These are the sorts of questions I’m facing currently. Can anyone give me a nudge in the right direction?
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://our.umbraco.com/forum/72140-is-umbraco-a-good-choice-for-building-this-project-web-store-with-a-difference