Thanks for the information Federico.
Your example site looks quite nice too.
From: Federico Ulfo
Sent: Monday, August 08, 2011 1:02 PM
To: NYPHP Talk
Subject: Re: [nyphp-talk] Shopping Cart Solutions
If she doesn't need any modification go for Magento or other open source
e-commerce, if she needs custom e-commerce is the solution, con: needs time,
pro: total control on any features. After a few pretty bad experience with
os-commerce, I started to install my custom CMS with an e-commerce module to
all of my clients, here an example www.supermercatodellarotonda.com, easy and
clean.
On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Rob D <visi...@ozemail.com.au> wrote:
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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