Virtuemart To Dazzle Connector
I “LOVE” the software called Shipworks by a company called “Interapptive” and have used it for several years. My company is growing from a couple of websites to 100+ by the end of the year and 500+ in total. Currently we use exclusively www.usps.com / US Post Office for outbound shipping. Shipworks charges $15 / month / site and is GREAT for a few sites, but WAY too expensive when you get past 10 sites or so.
I need to have a program or script poll a virtually unlimited number of ecommerce websites (shopping carts) and extract the orders/sales from these sites. This data needs to be able to be used to print out an invoice/packing list (Shipworks has a GREAT XML interface for this) and then the same data needs to be able to interface with a postage/label program or service (Endicia.com through its Dazzle desktop component is my prefered method) to print out my labels for the outbound mailed orders.
Shipworks is a desktop application. A web-interface app would be more appropriate.
My immediate need is to grab the orders, print labels and ship the items. If the created app could talk to the various Joomla/Virtuemart sites and paste in tracking numbers and send email notifications to the customer, it would be awesome.
Endicia has an interface called “Endicia Label Server” that might work as part of a web-based interface and be a replacement for Dazzle, however, for now, Dazzle through its polled directory or preferrably through its command line switches can print the postage (and preform address verifications).
If this project proceeds well. I would expect to hire additional expansions and added functionallity on a semi-regular basis.
I would love for this to be written as a Joomla/Virtuemart Extension. An independent web-app would be my second choice and a Desktop app (which may be the easiest) would be my third choice.