category notifications

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I think category notifications can be much better than the product notifications in terms of generating interest in e-commerce sites. Let’s consider a bookstore for example: an architect would like to be notified when a new book on architectural design is published, not only when a book s/he has already purchased has been put on sale. Currently, the product notifications feature can be useful, say, when an updated version of this book is published or gone out of stock, etc., only.

As far as I can think of, the Newsletter Management feature is not enough for this. Customers will mark some of the products to be notified and I think, here the shop-admin can also give new information about the related products that are within the same category. But this won’t be what the customer demanded, who had only wanted to be notified about a particular product(s).

Instead or in addition to product notifications, I would highly appreciate if a notifications feature for categories is developed. There can be section, where the customer sees all the categories and ticks the boxes next to the categories they would like to be notified, and maybe, for example, once a month, etc., so that when the shop admin updates a category, the system will automatically send notifications to people who want to be updated constantly and/or to those who want to be updated with regular intervals.

I am quite new to osCommerce and database driven websites. Although I have examined the database structure provided as a .pdf file along with the distribution, I could not figure out how such a feature can be inserted into the osCommerce system and also sorry if this issue has already been discussed elsewhere already.