Ideas from a Shop user

Hi I am not a developer but am a prospective user of Commerce

I put together my firms e commerce site a few years ago and am now looking to re build it with a better shopping cart system, so have been playing with Drupal & Ubercart for a few weeks now.

Here are a few issues I have come across that might help you to improve the system when it comes to the finished commerce module.

1. One item my business would require is to be able to have a text area field to enable the customer to enter a gift card message for each product. In Ubercart attributes I have found a patch that makes this possible. Looking at your video last night it looks like using cck manage fields this will be available in commerce ?
2. Trying one of the new themes Acquia Prosper there seems to be a compatibility problem with IE 8 such that attributes don't line up correctly and are biased to the right where as Firefox and Safari work fine.
   Since on our site, so far this year 68.8% of visitors have used IE then themes need to work with all browsers.
3. On the video you were showing the use of ajax to update field on the fly. Don't know if you have thought of this but here goes. With my current shopping basket software if a customer makes a mistake then the only way to correct it is to delete the item from the basket then start again.
   In ubercart I have found a module .... attributes/in-cart ... that lets you correct details while looking at the shopping cart. It does work ,but not with the Text area patched attribute file. But to the customer looks a bit of a mess on screen . My idea is with Commerce on the Review screen can we have a small button next to each field click on it and via ajax make any corrections . Would look nice and neat.
4. In Ubercart I have been unable to find a shipping or to us in the UK Delivery module that would work when using your own van . The flat rate module works up to a point but has a few issues. The hole shipping side of ubercart seem to be set up for the likes of Fedex Ups etc.
   Problem 1. customers get charged delivery for each item on the basket as opposed to One delivery charge Per order.
   Problem, 2 we deliver to 50 Towns & Villages and would like to set a range of delivery charges depending on location. Looking at the flat rate system I thought that I could use the delivery address postcode(zip) fields via conditional actions. but because the customer might type the post code in a range of styles e.g.. ME1 1AA, me11aa, Me1 1AA see what I mean. So you would need to be able to cope with upper and lower case letters. But also another post code area could be ME11 1AA so it not just a case of using the first 3 digits because it might be 4 in some areas.
   Then I thought use the Town/Village name in the conditional action but that does not come up on the list. Even if it did the upper/lower case problem would still be there.
   One idea on the delivery address field could we have a select box where the list of towns covered would be shown. This would also mean customer could not place orders for areas not covered.

5 It one of the posts you asked Do products need a SKU?
I agree with one of the members to a customer here in the UK they would ask what is SKU. Better to be able to change the site label for that field to what ever you want Product ref. Item ref etc

I hope these comments will give you an insight to how a user might want to configure Drupal Commerce