Thanks Gary for your response. I totally agree with your comments and, have tried to explain these points and many others to her previously but, feel that it fell on deaf ears.
Considering that I don't think she really has the time to manage an ecommerce web site properly, I think she is going to end up being very disappointed. I have passed your response onto her and hopefully she may take notice! Thanks again for your comments. Regards Rob From: Gary Mort Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2011 11:43 PM To: NYPHP Talk Subject: Re: [nyphp-talk] Shopping Cart Solutions On 8/6/2011 12:24 AM, Rob D wrote: Greetings All, I have been asked by my sister in-law to provide an ecommerce solution for her small business. As I do not consider myself to be knowledgeable enough in this area, I am posting to this list to ask your thoughts and recommendations. For a "small" business with only a few products, I find PHP ecommerce applications to be overly complicated and complex. SimpleCart works very well from a small business perspective: http://simplecartjs.com/ If your sister is editing her items directly, it just means you add a little html markup to each item to make it an item which can be purchased. There are a number of PHP scripts which have been written for different platforms to make creating products simpler[for example, RokCart is a simplecart implementation for Joomla! which adds a button on content editing to set the price and such and create a product. The downside of simplecart is that because it is all done via javascript - there is very little you can do to stop malicious buyers. If a buyer can edit the javascript, they can go ahead and change the prices on the products and then submit the sale and it will be processed. This means your sister would need to make sure to check the sales invoices in Paypal before shipping products and make sure the price is correct. Full fledged ecommerce solutions often have this type of functionality built in - they check invoice information returned by paypal and make sure it is valid - and flag invalid transactions. It's a low end solution, but honestly I've run into a lot of people who only get 3 or 4 sales via the internet a month. Spending lots of time and/or money to implement a high end ecommerce application is a waste. If/When business takes off and it is taking too much time to process the orders is when you upgrade[preferably to something that will support something like Amazon Fulfillment so that you can automate the entire process at some point]. Not knowing what business your sister is in, another thing I'll mention is to think very hard about whether or not to have a 'pick up' option for purchases and if so, set a reasonable shipping and handling cost. As an example, a small art Gallery which expects to sell mostly within 200 miles can be better served by offering local pick up and placing a 50-100$ handling charge on shipping paintings. If you can get the buyer into the gallery, then you have the chance to cross-sell other items. If you ship the item, it's a one time 500-1000$ sale AND packaging the whole thing up properly is a pain. So charge for that pain/inconvenience and encourage buyers to come to the store.
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