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Social commerce sample

Have you ever thought of generating more revenues with your social networking site?
Does anyone thought of creating a platform for designers, architects, painters, etc to sell their work online? We now have an easy way to create a social ecommerce site.
What do you mean by a social ecommerce site? social ecommerce or social commerce is a term used to refer to social networking applications which adds ecommerce elements into this. Some of the examples of popular social commerce applications are http://shoppify.com, http://thisnext.com etc.

Developing a custom application with the social commerce features is a big task, which requires a lot of time and money. So, we have an easy work around. We can create quality social commerce sites with the best open source social networking platform, ELGG. We can create a variety of social applications with the elgg platform. We extend the features of elgg by developing plugins and themes for elgg. Elgg social commerce plugin is a good plugin that enhance your social networking application with ecommerce features. The elgg social commerce plugin allows members of the site to buy and sell products-both downloadable and physical.

The elgg social commerce plugin has a lot of cool features like,

• Physical and digital products
• create and manage orders by admin of the site
• Users can buy and sell products
• Buyers can rate products
• Different payment options
• Provision to set a site commission by administrator
• Create and publish promotional coupon codes
• Provision to add more shipping and payment methods
• we integrated with elgg- built as an elgg plugin
• Packed with supporting widgets
• Multi language support
• Can support custom defined fields for products

You can buy this plugin at http://elggmarket.com as well.

I was looking at the available plugins that the award winning open source social networking platform-elgg offers to its dynamic user base. We have about 1000 elgg plugins released under the GPL license, under which elgg is released. Many of these plugins attracted my attention and I thought of putting down a note about my favorite elgg plugins that gears the growth of elgg as a popular and dependable social networking platform.
1. Tidypics Photo Gallery Plugin
Tidypics is one of the most popular and used plugin available in the community. This plugin adds the functionality of a photo album into your elgg site. Tidypics plugin helps you to create your own photo albums and upload photos into your albums. Users can tag those photos, comment on them and even add a provision to download those photos.

2. Elgg Social Commerce Plugin
Elgg Social Commerce plugin by elgg.in another popular elgg plugin. This is really a value added plugin into your elgg install. Social Commerce plugin adds an e-commerce store into your elgg install. This plugin is good and powerful but it has an advanced version which is released under commercial license. You can get the commercial version at http://socialcommerce.in. This plugin allow members to create their own online store. Members are allowed to buy and sell products, both physical and downloadable products online. Buyers can pay via paypal or other payment methods. Site admin can charge a percentage of the sales as commission. In summary, this plugin adds the many features of a good e-commerce system into your elgg install and adds a revenue model into it.

3. Profile Manager
This plugin provides a better use of profile fields, and configurable group fields. It has a lot of useful features and some of them are,
- search based on profile fields
- importing default or custom fields
- ordering of custom fields (drag and drop)
- add profile types
- add categories (draggable reordering, drop fields on categories to add)
- adds pulldown, radio, multiselect, calendar and datepicker field types
- show on register form (profile fields only)
- show output as tags
- mandatory fields (for register form, profile fields only)
- mandatory profile icon on register form
- disallow editing of a specific field (applies to edit profile only)
- replace profile fields access control with just one profile access option
- backup / restore profile fields configuration
- export user profile (meta)data to csv

The above are a list of few elgg plugins that attracted me mostly. I will add more plugins as I notice them.

There is no dearth of job sites in the market and with the increasing popularity of elgg platform in the social networks, the number of job sites offering resource of elgg developers is increasing rapidly. But, do these job sites really solve the purpose? There have been several reports by the companies that are looking out for professional elgg developers about irrelevant job applications. They have posted their requirement in almost every job board or job networks over the web to find the suitable developers and programmers. They are either getting lots of irrelevant applications or very little proper application. These factors are resulting in the loss of time and money. Therefore, the need of elgg job sites being the more target oriented have increased immensely. It is for sure that there is no lack of efficient and suitable candidates who are knowledgeable and experienced in the elgg platform. What is needed is the right medium that can connect the right candidates with the right job providers.

What should be the motto of the job boards?
Most of the job sites that promise to provide the right resources of elgg developers are not effective. What happens mostly is that you post your requirement about the elgg positions that you need to fill up with suitable candidates, and what you get is the load of entries that are not qualified at all. It may be good if you need to collect resumes, but it is not the case. You have placed the ads to hire suitable professionals, and you are not getting that. Therefore, the motto of the job sites must be to provide suitable candidates as per the requirement of the jobs.

Look out for specialized elgg job boards?
The job boards where you post the jobs give out a picture about the reputation of your organization and also the kind of elgg developers that you want to hire. If you place the elgg job requirements on a general job board, then the chances of getting the suitable candidates is very less. Therefore, you must look out for the specialized elgg job boards by the help of which you will get the best of elgg developers within your required timeframe.

Elggjobs.com fits to the bill perfectly. Post your job requirements here and get the best elgg programmers, designers and developers.

Elgg is the best open source platform for creating social applications. Elgg can be used to develop social aware applications like e-Learning systems, social and family networks, intranet systems, closed communities etc. But, elgg was lacking one of the great features of this decade, the ecommerce factor.

The first few years of elgg lived with out the e-commerce or lets say social commerce features until when an Indian Company called Cubet Technologies came out with a new & feature rich elgg plugin called “Elgg Social Commerce Plugin“. This plugin is very feature rich and configurable, but its not FREE.  As per their website, it costs $249, but it looks worth.

For thos who look for a cheap solution, they have released a FREE version at the elgg’s plugin list at http://community.elgg.org/pg/plugins/webcubes/read/232027/elgg-social-commerce-plugin

The people beghind this cool plugin have developed many other elgg plugins and are focusing on elgg.