E-Commerce ... Help !!

[seekituk]

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Hi and Happy New Year everyone,

I've been approached to do an e-commerce site for a local company and don't want to turn work away but have never gone down this route before.

I think I'm ok as far as the shopping cart sode goes, it's more the credit card payment area I'm unsure of.

Has anyone got any advice or tips on where to start and what I need to do?

Kind regards

Jason

[deadgoodundies]

Jason, give me a shout on email or MSN and i'll give you all the help you want.

[matty]

work out how much they think they'll be turning over, and then install OSCommerce, with either:

1) high levels of turnover - go for worldpay. it's easy to set up, reliable and easy to integrate, and fairly low charges per transaction. but there's a set-up fee, and a monthly fee too, so only worthwhile if you've got a good level of turnover.

2) low levels of turnover - go for either a secure server and storing their card details for processing offline, or use paypal. It's free to setup, no monthly charge, but you pay a bigger percentage on each transaction.

[Aceicol]

Mate it's pretty easy if you use something like OSCommerce as someone has said, and you'll get all the support you need over at their forums.

Also depending on whether your client has a merchant account already or not I'd recommend going with Protx as opposed to Worldpay, whilst Worldpay are good (in my opinion) they aren't the cheapest.

I've also heard some people moan like hell about Worldpay, but in my previous experience with them, they were good just expensive.

Hope that helps, feel free to ask for anymore advice if you require.
Alex

[deadgoodundies]

Oscommerce is a good free option but i've heard that it's quite hard to modify the templates to make it NOT look like a OScommerce site (not saying it is just what i've heard)

I would recommend x-cart (as thats what we use) or there is also cs-cart which from what im told was created by some ex employees of x-cart.

I would say no to worldpay as well as they are expensive.
Protx is good (again this what we use) but we have had some issues with them accepting certain switch/solo/maestro cards as it refuses them if they don't have a issue number (and some of the newer cards don't)

Also make sure you have a secondary payment method available like paypal , as some people like the convenience of it and if the primary payment method goes down you have a backup.

[lowndsy]

OSCommerce isn't too bad to customise - take a look at this one - http://www.amorejeweller.com - it's still obviously OSCommerce if you look under the hood, but it is far enough from the "default" look and feel for customer to know they're serious about selling.

[Aceicol]

lol, my company also created a Jewellery site out of OSCommerce, our Tech department uses it for most of the Ecomm sites we use. No point in re-inventing the wheel.

Take a look at www.clogaugoldcentre.com - thats the last one we did in OSC and again whilst it is OSC under the bonnet, its not blatantly obvious.

[sandy007]

hi,

can anyone please clarify the difference between www.sitename.com &
www1.sitename.com
www2.sitename.com etc.

i am unable to find out any propper link regarding this. please anyone can clarify my problem.

[lowndsy]

www. is the standard "domain" for the worldwide web - it is the public facing aspect of it, but it is actually a kind of subdomain/shortcut.

The domain name is sitename.com, and the www is an appendage which says "look at the public facing www section of this site". Most decent web hosts direct http://sitename.com to that as well, but not all - you might notice that a lot of sites don't work without the "www". It's not because they're broken, just not configured in the usual way - remember the internet which most people see is actually one of the simpler applications of some quite complex networking technology, and different systems have very precise control over sub domains and other access rights, so preconfiguring for the internet is a low priority or not even possible for some people, and internet unix geeks seldom care about being user friendly anyay.

Some sites which are very large don't want all of their content in one directory structure. It becomes unwieldy and if it is large enough won't even fit on one web server.

This is where subdomains come in handy. A subdomain can be used to organise content, for example hving english.mysite.com and french.mysite.com, but using those natty advanced networking features and some dns tricks they can link two or more servers under the same domain name - the www1 server could be in London and the www2 server could be in tampa bay, Florida.

"www2" and "www3" etc are added to a domain to make the most out of a websites structure without it necessarily looking like you are using subdomains.

For example - www.warnerbros.com redirects to http://www2.warnerbros.com/main/homepage/homepage.html. Try changing the www2 to a www and you'll see it doesn't work.
First it's just a way of organising the massive content of the warnerbros site into managable chunks and second, (especially useful for warnerbros where they have a lot of content which expires and are constantlya dding new stuff), they can dynamically add new resources to the system as new content becomes available.
Bandwidth is a big issue for large online systems so spreading the load over several systems means the bandwidth usage is spread out, plus highly reliable servers can be used for sensitive sections like admin and transaction histories and more normal servers an house normal stuff like guestbooks and standard content, so it helps reduce costs by allocation the correct hardware and resources to the correct tasks. Look it up uder "load balancing" or "allocating correct network resources". The examples I've given are massively simplified - soe people make careers out of designing this sort of system, and there are automatic setups which do it all for you.
In this case the www2 isn't that important because the user remembers the warnerbros.com address, and warnerbros get to spread their load cross multiple computers, adding more and more systems as they add more content. All they need to be careful about is that any addresses a user might type in to their browser begins with a bog standard "www" - the user doesn't care where they are sent after that, and most search engines can still see the content.

[seekituk]

Cheers for the help and advice so far everyone

So is using an off the shelf application like OSCommerce or X-Cart the safest option for the shopping cart facility or can you write your own?

I've seen plenty of tutorials in mags writing shopping carts with MySQL and PHP but is it best to steer clear and use one of the above?

From what I understand so far, if you use an off the shelf package you are fairly limited to site design and layout.

Ok, so lets say the customer wants me to go ahead, what are the procedures required to get an e-commerce site up and running?

[deadgoodundies]

Some people prefer to write their own if they are going to reuse it for other clients and market it as such - personally as someone has said above why bother reinventing the wheel.
If you use something like x-cart then you can have it as your base and then just easily build upon it if you need to make extra features and modules.
It uses smarty php so you can keep your design and coding seperate (plus there are quite a few 3rd part developers and a great forum)

[csn]

Zencart is an offshoot of OS Commerce but from my perspectives offers better integration with credit card processors such as NoChex.

Mind you, both Zencart and OS Commerce take a bit of effort to get them looking nice!

[csn]

So is using an off the shelf application like OSCommerce or X-Cart the safest option for the shopping cart facility or can you write your own?

Every application has bugs. The benefit with a pre-built script is that you usually have a team of people working on updates and new features. Working on your todd means you are relying upon yourself to spot errors.

There comes a time though when sites outgrow shopping carts. Too many customers, too much redundant coding for features you don't use, etc.

If you have no experience of shopping cart development, stick with a script now and when you have time later, build your own application. Besides, playing with other people's scripts can give you inspiration for features you want in your custom application.

A word of advice - make sure that whichever solution you use, you have a good looking template. Sites that look like the OS Commerce demo site are horrid and look unprofessional (from a web design perspective).

[seekituk]

Thanks again.

Looks like I'll be doing a bit of downloading and fiddling this weekend then.

[Jus]

Dear All,

My appologies, first post, may have got it wrong, so be easy on me!

I have a strong e-commerece concept, am currently using SBI! as a learning platform and looking to get cracking and building the site this week. SBI has been excellent in it's teaching, but is it the best platform to use ? Your thoughts and recommendations would be very welcome. Hope the weekend was good, many thanks J