Hey all,

I am working for a fabrication company now where I maintain the website, publicity, etc. Just recently, we have gotten into retail sales, so we're looking for an online storefront.

My question is, is it worth it for me to code an e-commerce site along with all of the other things that go with it, or should I go with a template or a web design firm to get the big stuff out of the way for me?

My experience is quite minimal when viewed over a large scale. I have been messing with CSS and HTML, but when it comes to PHP and etc, I am lost.

Any help is appreciated

-Dan

Hi Dan-

It sounds like your gut is telling you to get some professional help, so I would recommend looking into either outsourcing the bulk of the coding or using a pre-built cart solution. I work for a company that provides online catalogs to people in your situation. I don't want to spam the board, but if you would like to get some info on our product, let me know.

Best of luck with your project,
Jenny

Always go custom design if you want your site to convert site visitors to inquiries/clients. If your site looks like every other template or wordpress blog out there, you'll bounce your visitors by looking like a canned marketing ploy

You could do what you are capable of doing and hire a web designer to do what you are not capable of doing yourself.

It would be easier to use built shopping cart for the store part of the site, most likely you will be able to redesign it to meet your needs. If you need assistance - you sure will be able to hire designers to make integration for you. It is important for you to choose platform for the store now to my mind.

Store building from scratch would be much more expensive that using a ready-made shopping cart solution, which is also likely to be well-tested by software developers and user community.

For solutions which come with an open source code, not only third-party companies but, in most cases, softeare manufacturers themselves provide design services which allow to make your store look totally unique.

Dan, since your experience is minimal, I strongly suggest that you hire a web designing firm to do the work for you. Hiring a professional can save you time and effort.

I am an owner of online storefront and I bought my template from AlgoZone. They have a wide array of templates for you choose from. Their products are quite expensive though but its worth the price. Another site that I would recommend is the Crystal Templates, though I have not tried purchasing from them their products seem to be competitive and they have a cheaper price compared to AlgoZone.

Well if you needed to have a large scale ready for business you really need to have a ready build template for that matter.

Yeah it seems like the more research I do, the more I'm learning about it, as I was flying pretty blind before.

I guess my main question is on the actual website, would it be optimal to get a template that's already done or design a new one... But it seems to me like it would be best to work with a firm.

Thanks for the help everyone. I am trying to do some more research so I'll know what to do with all of this and if I need help I will surely get in touch with someone hre.

My other concern is how we are processing orders. Right now we are not keeping inventory in the shop, but rather we are submitting faxed Purchase Orders, having them processed to our account, and then drop shipped to the customer. How would this affect the website and sales we will generate from there? I'd hate to have to look at all the orders coming in and have to fax out a PO for each one.

Regarding order processing: you may pick a shopping cart which allows manual entering of order details via admin panel or printing invoices (if I correctly understand your needs). If you would like to automate the process of sending order details to an external system, it can likely be done with a custom integration script.

Does it all make any sense, or maybe you mean anything different?

In any case. please, keep us informed about your progress.

Prebuilt unless you get help

Well our webhost provides a shopping cart solution with osCommerce, and I can look up purchasing a SSL certificate. The only thing else I'd need is the template for the storefront correct?

We're still working with companies on a pre-built solution, but our last estimate was $5,000 which included overhauling our existing website.

If you make it yourself, sooner or later you'll be making excellent storefronts and shopping systems all by yourself. If you delegate it, you'll always delegate it. Given the costs, and the ease of doing it... the answer is obvious. But why do people always use php? Php is really easy to hack. Can't you learn perl? I mean if you have php capability you're on Linux, which means you have perl capability too.

Look up "php injection" to get a rough idea of how easy it is to hack php. Perl, at least, doesn't publicly spew out detailed error messages. Even aspx does that, although it's easy to switch them off.

PHP has an easier learning curve - that is why it's so popular. As for SQL injections, carefully written and well-tested applications are protected from them in case a hosting is also properly configured. Besider, there are security tools like HackerGuardian which perform regular automatic tests for possible security holes.

Dan, if you have decided to stick with OsCommerce, there are lots of pre-built templates for OsCommerce (google them), you will be able to use one of them or have new unique template created for you from scratch.

Also, you can consider some commercial packages, in this case you will be able to get professional support service for your system. In addition each software company usually offers design services for the software.

I would purchase an exisiting eCommerce storefront system, shop around find one that is reputable and secure, and then use your skills with html and css to design around the shopping cart system.

I would recommend the prebuilt solution for your first store for one reason.

1> Cost of time and developement.

Developing a complete store involves creating the backsite shopping cart, the product database interface, the shipper costing interface, business tracking database interface, beta testing and debugging everything above, and a whole lot more.

This can cost thousands when there are proven cart solutions out there that are good at what they do and cost $150 to $500. Then all you do is create the store front, program the product database, and setup shipping providers and a merchant payment processor.

I agree to johniman7. Purchasing an ecommerce storefront system will help you save time and effort. A little bit of coding for html and CSS is needed to fully customize your site.

Here are some site that I can recommend for ecommerce solution: AlgoZone and Cheap Templates