eCommerce student looking for advice

Hello everyone, I’m a student in college majoring in E-Commerce. I’m a few months into the major so far and I’m still getting familiar with it. I was wondering if anyone else took this major in college (and what classes did you take?)? I took a website development class a year or so ago (HTML and CSS and some Javascript involved) and plan on taking an advanced class soon. What else should I learn? What are jobs looking for in web developers? I did some research already, but alot of the material such as ASP.NET isn’t offered so I’ll have to learn it myself in the next few months. And a quick question for web developers: Do you memorize html tags etc. right from the beginning or do jobs let you use the internet for help when you need reference? (Just asking for personal reference)

I wasn’t sure where to post this, but I figured here was a good place. I appreciate the help!

I’ve never seen a program with an eCommerce major – if you’re willing to share, what school offers it?

In terms of your questions I’d like to clarify one thing first: Your major is eCommerce but you’re asking about web developer jobs. Is your focus on development or is that where your interests lie in taking a backend emphasis to build ecommerce solutions? I ask because most people who call themselves eCommerce + anything are looking to do marketing, merchandising or store ops as a focus and want to respond to what you’re looking for.

Hey Ted, it’s actually listed as a Computer Science major with a concentration in eCommerce, sorry for confusing you incase. For colleges offering programs in eCommerce, see these links:

http://collegeprowler.com/majors/e-commerce/
http://www.thebestcolleges.org/the-10-best-e-commerce-e-business-degree-programs/

For the major part, I’m interested in the technical side as opposed to the business side - which is, as you state, marketing, merchandising etc. So I’m interested in both web development and eCommerce solutions.

Just be a developer does not fill the bill any longer. Many employers ask for business orientation and eCommerce is one example. I would check available open source projects and review what they offer and possibly look in the code. Most of them are PHP based.

Example: AbanteCart, Magento, OpenCart, oscommerce, zencart, etc…

Some bigger eCommrce platforms use JAVA, not many ASP as I know of.

I have also taken marketing and management courses in the past - is that what you mean? And thanks for the advice - so I wouldn’t have to learn ASP or C# then (from what I’ve read elsewhere)?

In my experience enterprise customers always request asp.net.

Another point worthy of note is that asp.net developers generally get paid more than open source coders.

It’s really tough to answer this question with the given information. “ecommerce” is so ambiguous and broad that it doesn’t have a lot of meaning from a direct employment standpoint. For an overview, ecommerce could be sales, marketing, operations, customer support, programming, design, logistics, etc…

I would ask what sort of job do you want post-college, and why you chose ecommerce / computer science as your major? Talking about specific areas of study like specific programming languages isn’t really appropriate without knowing what you want to do.

I think you can search in Google, and I want to suggest one thing that till you don’t do practicals you will not be able to remember those things and there is much more chance to create mistakes in development. You don’t have remember coding terms instead just do more and more practicals.

As a web developer , is better that you know to develop in different platform so that you able to stand out among others.
Once you master one platform , it might not a big problem for you to learn another platform as long you love your job.

You have already done a good job. Now I think you should try involve in PHP courses. These types of courses have a lot of scope. And you can get success in your life in this field…