What first time eCommerce system would you recommend?

Business
1

I am have been asked to turn this beta site into a shop, http://www.christianbookreview.co.uk/beta/index.html

From the above site you will see that the number of books sold will be around 200, the volume of sales though will be small, maybe single figures per annum. Being primarily a Book Review site each book will have a whole single product page devoted to it as in the site above. Sales expected to be mostly in UK. Don’t mind paying for it, maybe £100 or so, but it has to be easy for a non-developer like myself to use

The owner of the site requires a very simple interface and wants to keep, if at all possible, the overall look and feel. This may not be possible for the pages that list all the books in one category on one page. This is primarily a review site with a shop. So not everything will be for sale, there maybe free downloads for example.

This is also the first time I will have built an online shop so I need it to be really simple, really easy to set up and quick. And I need your help!

What do you recommend? Where to start?

Many thanks

2

Blue Sky,

Whatever shopping cart you go with, make sure it and the host is PCI compliant. Many shopping carts will likely go by the wayside soon because of this security. We use Miva Merchant with all our eCommerce clients - it’s free but the site must be hosted on a Miva Merchant enabled network.

It’s easy to use and you should be able to copy and paste your current design into the CMS part. The admin is easy to use and there are many inexpensive custom modules that can be purchased, downloaded and strt using in 5 minutes.

This isn’t a sales pitch but if you’d like to know more, contact me off list. Also store demos are available on the mivamerchant dot com website.

3

I am just going to sit and wait it out until bigcommerce or premiumwebcart comes up before I join in the conversation o_0

Hey Bluesky, does your client ship via Royal Mail or DHL, both, or?

4

Thanks for this and I will follow up. In the meantime, pardon my ignorance but what is “PCI Compliant”??

5

Don’t have a cart yet but I assume it will be Royal Mail here in the UK

6

Make sure the Royal Mail Shipping Module is or can be integrated into whatever cart you choose.

If you are starting off with core osCommerce, I am not saying that you should, you would need to find and install the proper contribution for Royal Mail.

7

why not try osCommerce or variants?

8

Kadir Korkmaz, interesting …you and I can have a conversation about Feta Cheese and Olives while playing some backgammon and drinking tea :slight_smile:

9

:slight_smile: thanks, good idea except cheese and backgammon

10

Blue Sky, you can check this screenshot, this is my osCommerce based new project :

http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/2250/tabcart.png

Some features:

  • fully ajax based
  • smart tab redirects
  • simplified for speed checkout process
  • new shopping interface
11

Not sure what I am looking at but thanks.

The thing is I stipulated that it has to be very easy for a non developer to set up. My experience is html and css so anything open source is, franky, a bit scary

12

I would give you an answer but now now I’m too nervous to post …:shifty:

PCI compliance is basically a set of regulations that the credit card folks have put out and they dictate how you handle credit card transactions, storage, security, etc. There are some that say not to worry but I worry about these things as an “asset” owner with plenty to lose. My wife refuses to live in our tent full time.

13

How will you be handling the product fulfillment?

In house or a 3rd party?

14

in house - its a very small operation run by one person. Sales volume is expected to be in the region of only 10-20 books and downloads per month.

15

as long as she’s cool with staying there part time bro, you can always have her come back in the trailer later :slight_smile:

16

I actually upgraded from my “single life”
tent to a motorhome to get my wife to
go camping with me and the kids.

It took me 2 years but I finally sealed the
deal when we went to the state fair and she
had to use a port-a-potty. I mentioned that
if we had an RV, she could always have her
own private bathroom …and in one hot, humid
and rather bad smelling toilet trip …my kids, wife
and I travel in high end trailer park style - :lol:

I call the RV our rolling port-o-potty.