eCommerce Dev Experiences? Nightmares? Fame and Fortune?

[donnaf]

What was your best - or worst - experience with ecommerce development?

What solution(s) did you use? Was it successful? Give us the scoop...

It's always nice to know that someone else bombed out - and nice to know that someone is now banking it too!

Cheers..

Donna

[Sahti]

E-Commerce is not a big part of my business since the main part of my business is in my physical store. But I am using my online prescence as an extension for our mailorder business. But anyway, I put a catalog up online almost a year ago (about a year and a half after we had a website up). We didn't have a secure site, so I informed our customers of that (up front) and gave them the options of faxing in a copy of the filled in order form rather than submitting it via the web or we could call them to get the payment info. Late Summer we finally got a secure server account. From the time we put an online catalog out there through early December we had maybe 3 or 4 online orders. For about the last three weeks we have been shipping out about one online order a day (we've had an increase in phone orders, too). But I think that being online for nearly a year, trading links, submitting to search engines, web address on everything we send out, etc. we are finally becoming easier to find. Most of the online orders we have had recently have been from customers that have never called us for a catalog or are not on our mailing list. Oh, and I don't think the recent increase is just holiday shopping because the items ordered aren't gift items and most of the orders were after Christmas. Our web traffic has been gradually increasing, too. When I finally put some tracking logs on our site(about a 1 1/2 years ago) a really good day was 20 page views. Now we are averaging over 100 page views a day (a really good day about 250).
--Bill

ps: we are in a niche market--home beer and wine making supplies, so our market is not really large.

[big_al]

Hi,

Well the main thing I see now a days with ecommerce is that it can be hard with some customers when you quote them because there are so many cheap "out of the box" solutions out there.

But like with many of these solutions they are "generic" and may not be completly customizable to the customers needs, Although more and more ecommerce solutions keep on poping up so the choice is up to the person buying the system. I still find there are alot of people out there that do need a custom system.

Well thats from a developers view

Just thought I'd throw in my two cents

[donnaf]

As far as a custom solution and making the site database driven what do you all suggest? My main concern for the type of product is being able to customize each product page individually - some will list out the different variations, some will use drop downs, etc...

Any suggestions or ideas in general would help. I was looking at Mercantec using Dell's hosting - feedback?

Thanks!

Donna