So like most of us, I have a marketing department who thinks
everything is a simple matter of "point and click" and that changes
can be made in under 30 seconds because OF COURSE it's all done in
Photoshop 
Obviously I'm trying to train (or would it be
"educate"?) them to the reality of it all, but it's a slow process.
I'm interested in - conceptually - what some of you have seen in terms
of best practices for accommodating complex e-commerce requirements.
For example, let's say I have a "product". This week the marketing
department wants to run a special that says this product is 15%
cheaper if another specific product is also in the user's cart. Next
week they want to change it to be $10 off if the user also buys a
special "plan" (from a different model). Week 3 they want to require
the purchase of a different product to be with said product - you get
the idea.
At any given time, I have AT MOST twelve hours notice on said
changes. So far I've basically been telling them to piss off, but I
really want to accommodate them if at all possible.
The first (and current) iteration of this e-commerce project, I
focused on what I called a "centralized purchasing paradigm", where
the user started at any point in a non-linear process, added a product
or a "plan" to their "cart", and all kinds of calculations and
conditional logic made its way into the view due to deadlines enforced
by (the commonly clueless) "management". This obviously is bad
design, but unfortunately due to the way I had it all tied in together
and the various "requirements", I didn't really have much of a choice
in the matter.
Now I'm looking at a re-work on this codebase, from scratch, and
thinking that maybe it's best to separate products/sales by type, and
force a pseudo-linear process, segmenting things out, because I don't
know how to accommodate the strange scenarios above without writing
fresh code logic each and every time. At least this way, I'm able to
make changes to one type of product without affecting the others
(separating them into multiple controllers and adding methods only on
specific models).
This would theoretically result in controllers/routes like phones/
blackberry/buy/1 or phones/samsung/view/3 or plans/traditional/buy/4
and with the combination of plan 4 the customer MUST have feature ID 3
in their cart at an additional price, but if the plan is ID 2 they
don't have to have it, if the plan ID is 5 they *can't* have it, etc.
What's the best (most modular/OOP) way to go about this? I really
want to give our marketing department the agility that they're asking
for, but I just don't know any good design patterns to accomplish this
for a one-person (me) design, development, and web management "team"
with multiple projects.
Does anyone have any input on better e-commerce design patterns, or
can you point me to some trusted/realistic (theoretical, but with
concrete examples) on the matter?
Thank you very much.
