Hi all,
I currently am employed by a major international plastics manufacturing and distribution company as a web front ender and general web go to guy. Markerting manager has now approached me in regards to the technical requirements and approach required to implement ecommerce into the new site we are currently developing. This is an area I really dont know anything about and would love to hear what advice you guys have, as I say I this is a grey area so all advice welcomed.
Thanks all
Kyle
Some questions you might want to ask before you buy anything:
What are you selling?
Are you selling physical products or digital products? If you are selling physical products you will need shopping cart software that calculates shipping costs, allows you to update your stock and so forth. With digital products there is no need for shipping and you will have unlimited quantity of products so will not need certain features.
Can you change the look and feel of the shopping cart?
If you are looking to add your own logo and feel to the shopping cart, then you will need to buy software that is written in open-source code. Then with a few html skills and access to dreamweaver or frontpage you will be able to make any design changes that you like.
What is your budget?
Shopping cart software ranges from free to several grand. Figure out what you are willing to pay and then make your list of possible shopping carts to choose from.
Does he want to integrate this into an existing site
or is he looking for a complete site rebuild.
The cheapest and fastest route to selling is
to use the site you have already and simply
link a cart to it.
For less than a $100 and 1 to 2 days of effort,
you could be up and running.
Of course, if they are looking to start selling
thousands of products, then you’ll burn a LOT
of time simply writing product descriptions for
each item.
Oh c’mon, that’s so 1999.
If you’re still using Frontpage you could just use the standard template of the shopping cart software - that will most likely even look much better than anything “designed” with Frontpage.
major international plastics manufacturing and distribution company
For less than a $100 and 1 to 2 days of effort,
Are you sure a major international company will go with a “few bucks - many bugs”-100$-software patched up in 2 days?
Pretty sure they’ll not…
Good thinking. So, before starting up with the website, you need to choose the product you want to sell. The design and layout of your website depends on the product or services you are going to sell.
Hi Kyle,
If you want to add in a store to your existing website, you may want to consider using a hosted cart store solution. This type of solution will allow you to copy and paste auto generated text/script code in to your page where you want features like Checkout, Add to Cart, Buy Now buttons or shopper summary info like Order Cost, Number of Items in Cart etc.
A hosted cart solution will then incorporate the shopping cart functionality in to your web site without you having to install and maintain shopping cart software on your server or manage a back-end database for your products/orders etc.