Just wondering why certain things are not easily done

[crrrum]

So forgive me in advance, I'm new to Prestashop and thought that it would become my solution for my website.  I come from the PHP4 bad days of osCommerce and also moved to Amazon webstore which was a disaster.

 

Two things I'm wondering about that I consider "flawed" in prestashop (and this is probably true of other carts still).

 

1. Tax by State County.   I'm in NY state in the US.  We have a 4% tax state wide.  Each county has its own local tax in addition to the 4%.  The tax you pay is dependent on where your order is shipped to.  Also NYC residents have special tax exemptions for any clothing/shoes under $110.  This means if a coupon or sale lowers the cost of an item below $110 then that item is now eligible for the tax exemption.  Back in osCommerce I spent a ridiculous amount of time doing custom code to get this to work.  These days I'd prefer to focus on my business not coding so I'm looking for a cart that at least handles tax correctly.  As I started prepping my first prestashop I realized that it does not innately handle my tax scenarios.

 

I read the bug submitted to include this tax behavior over at forge and am pretty disappointed at Remy's response.  I do think I can use the zip tax ranges to cover like 90% of my tax scenarios but still... you're leaving potential NYC retailers in the dust here (as well as Ohio, Florida, etc).  Also oddly enough prestashop had something that seemed to work in 1.4 so why change it on 1.5?

 

2. Inventory Management with Combinations.  The documentation on import/export is woefully limited.  Its strange to learn more about such a basic admin ability through the forums.  My experience with Amazon has taught me that EASY inventory management (because their inventory management is BROKEN) is incredibly important to running a successful business.  The UI for inventory management is awkward, why the separate tabs?  What's wrong with all-in-one?

 

I hope I don't come off as a whiny noob.  I'm just a little disappointed as I thought Prestashop was going to be our new cart.  Perhaps there aren't enough stores with our tax scenario to matter to prestashop and perhaps a clothing retailer like mine is not the primary audience that Prestashop wants.  AND PAYING for modules to do some of the hard work is completely the opposite of what a starting website (or recovering in our case) is looking for an open solution for.

 

So in the end I do hope to find a not so hard way to do what I need as I haven't given up on Prestashop yet.  If I do end up putting all the zip codes in myself I will post.  I don't know what I'll do about the NYC tax exemption either but we'll see.

 

Regards!

[ibndawood]

Hi there,

 

Welcome to prestashop.

 

Regarding your first question. Prestashop does allow you to localize your shop extensively. By localize I mean you can specify what tax applies. You can set the taxes for product level, shipping level, even based on either invoice address or shipping address. You can manage all of this without having to do custom code. You do have to read through documentation on how to configure them though. You can also create custom tax rules.

 

http://help.prestashop.com/en/doc/AdminTaxes?version=1.5.6.1&country=US#

https://docs.google.com/a/transvelo.com/file/d/0BxmC16gQK81fZHZ3Vzd3dFFJZzg/edit?usp=drivesdk 

 

Regarding Inventory Mangement, I agree to the part where prestashop does not allow import/export combinations and some of its limitations (I have personally used to import 1000+ products and they were easy but my shop does not heavily use combinations).

 

Thanks