Platform suggestions for a large new site

Business
1

Hello all

I have developed some ecommerce sites from scratch before and handled integration into sagepay. But I have not used any off the shelf packages.

previous solutions have all been php / mysql.

I have been offered a chance to develop and run a site for a company who have recently got some new investors and want to take the company to new level.

They are not so worried about the cost, although no blank cheques have been issued yet :wink: but performance and functionality are big considerations.

They have 50k+ products and currently make Ā£250,000 in sales a year. They want to double / triple the latter.

A consideration is that I would like to do less programming and more running of the site.

They do have a new in house management system that it will need to tie into, but I donā€™t want that to affect the decision at the moment.

One more possible consideration is that they may split the products across multiple sites. But that should not sway suggestions too much.

So that is it! Would love to hear your suggestions on what solutions I should look to.

Iā€™m trawling through all of the big names I have found so far.

BTW - I notice that the list of ecommerce sticky was last edited in 2008. Is it still up to date? Have there been big changes in the market since then? Or is it still updated but the date doesnā€™t change?

2

Hey all

I thought Iā€™d add a feature list to this thread to see if anyone has any thoughts as to options that could fullfill all of these requirements.

Number of SKUs is actually 30,000
Full shopping cart
Support major payment gateways
wish lists
order tracking
Order history
customer reviews
CMS
clear urls
good for SEO
special offer prices
Refine list of products by

  • manufacturer
  • price ranges
  • sub categories

Possible optional requirements
multiple pricing levels

As far as I can see only enterprise magento will offer all of these features, but Iā€™m very keen to hear of alternatives.

Sites that they want to rival:
Screwfix
Axminster
Rutlands

3

If youā€™re talking ā€œenterpriseā€ type solutions then IBM Websphere is a commonly used platform (with the price to match).

4

many thanks bluedreamer, thats just the sort of info I was after.

rutlands and axminster seem to be running on asp sites.

I am currently working on a site with 120K SKUs running on PHP and MySQL and it runs surprisingly well. The MySQL server is the bottleneck currently.

Iā€™ve downloaded magento free to evaluate that, but the comparison chart doesnt really delve very deep into the feature list, understandably.

Or maybe Iā€™m over thinking the complexity of this? To compete with sites like those would be possible with something other than magento?

5

Itā€™s not always the particular software you use but more how you use it that counts. At the end of the day a shopping cart/ecommerce system is just a set of tools that allow you to create a method displaying products/services and a facility for people to buy them.

It really all boils down to a few key areas:

  1. Does the system have all the features your business needs?
  2. Is the system user friendly, not just from a customer point of view, but also for the poeple who will have to manage it day to day?
  3. How well supported is it? If thereā€™s a problem with the system how are you going to get it fixed (remembering every minute of downtime youā€™re losing sales).