EU eCommerce policy compliance

To make OpenCart compliant to the european union eCommerce policy, there are some enhancements  required:

• In general show prices with an information that VAT is included and shipping costs are excluded
• The cart must show single product price, not only the combined price
• There must be a way to display various information texts with user confirmation and IP/timestamp saving before the checkout process finishes i.e. confirm legal notices. Should be flexible because it varies in different countries.
• There must be a way to order without saving the userdata within a customer account and without registering first. Therefore the customer orders and his data must not be saved anywhere outside the order dataset. Also only order relevant data may be collected. Tip: Generate another method -> Order without registering a customer account
• There should be a way to link notices to products i.e. for enhaced warranty or different return policy for clothing and hygiene articles, custom-built products  etc.

That's it - For now! More to come.

Update: I've started coding this into OpenCart. OpenCart 0.7.2 will include the following enhancements:

• Show Price with Tax rate and Shipping information Link
• Show Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy and Return Policy before purchase on checkout with optional user confirmation, very user customizable and flexible
• VAT ID-No. input field has been added to general shop data
• Cart now contains single price as well as combined price per item

All enhancements are optional and can be configured trough the backend.

On the ToDo List for upcoming releases are the following enhancements:

• Global eMail Footer with company information and VAT ID No.
• Enhance mail class to support SMTP with SMTP Auth
• Per product information page for special policies and notes

If you have additional suggestions, please feel free to tell me. Please note, that I only do modifications to guarantee EU eCommerce policy compliance.

Excellent, keep up the good work!

Sounds good! Thanks for the effort! Looking forward to .7.2

nice one scandic

how are you contributing your code to 0.7.2 - is there a repository to check into or are you mailing the developers?

ogun wrote: how are you contributing your code to 0.7.2 - is there a repository to check into or are you mailing the developers?

Well, at this time this is really easy because there's only one developer
Maybe there will be a repository when more ppl are contributing code...

lol, I'm an ignorant bugger sometimes - only just started looking at usernames and postcounts.

Update: I've submitted my code to Daniel about a week ago and he will implement these features sometime. It's just too much for a simple contribution because it requires core modifications and since ther're alot of bugs still open we're going to get updates really often. Please don't msg me anymore for the code. I don't work on it anymore. I'm going to concentrate on the german language files and will put them into the new contribution file section soon.

scandic wrote: To make OpenCart compliant to the european union eCommerce policy, there are some enhancements  required:

Thumb up for your work man!!! Great great job! Helps a lot of freelance webdesigners out there that offer solutions to their clients that aren't aware of legal aspects and implications of their work. A couple of months ago in France there was a huge tracking campaign of SME e-commerce busineses that weren't respecting the national or EU regulations on their websites, and I know quite a few webmasters that got into huge problems because of it.
Making sure OpenCart is compliant by default with such rules is a great great news and something that shouldn't be forgoten. Good one there scandic

The latest version is at least partially compliant. You can set it to force people to agree to terms before checking out or creating an account.