A rational balance of paid plugins for the WPeC store

Folks,

We sell CD/DVD/videogames/vinyl on 7 Amazon marketplaces, eBay, PriceMinister and a few less known platforms. Later in 2015 we will be also listing books. The current size of our catalog is about 55 000 SKUs.

We are quite experienced with codewriting, but mostly on Microsoft (.NET, Transact-SQL, etc.) Our infrastructure is built around Windows (SQL Servers/MSMQs, etc.) We use SQL Server 2012 in production and nearly all API calls to marketplacces address the catalog stored on SQL Server.
At the moment we do not see any reasons to change/migrate our infrastructure to another platform.

Starting this year we are considering WP as a platform for an own eCommerce shop (e-Store). About a month ago we started to test eCommerce plugins for WP and complete solutions available on the market. The critical limitation of all of them is unability to abstract data layer. In other words, we couldn’t find a official support of SQL Server.

We accepted it as a fact and decided go on further. Now we are fine if the catalog (Products table) is stored on MySQL, so we can update it automatically via a custom updater or a Zapier.

Here comes an important thing about catalog manageability. Unfortunately the most of solutions are not customizeable, i.e. we cannot make a custom product’s template with a set of attributes we need.

Example: we sell CDs and make no use of the attributes like Height/Width/Weight of an item. Instead we need the attributes like Title/Artist/Label/YearOfRelease, etc.

Making a blueprint (a custom product template) is either non-trivial or impossible with the most of existing eCommerce solutions for WP.

We decided to go a bit further and ask an experts:

1. Is there any option to abstract WP e-Commerce data layer and to address SQL Server table(s) from WPeC? –optional question
2. Is there any convenient way to create and manage custom product classes and replace generic product page with custom products?
3. Which plugins/add-ons could make us achieve the desired result?

Assuming you are now aware of our product groups, what would be a rational balance of plugins/addons which would allow us to implement our e-Store, based on the provided requirements.

I will also be happy if you just say: “guys, everying described is possible. You just need to buy this and this plugin/add-on”.

Thanks.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-e-commerce/