Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Ecommerce software experiences

Stephen asks:

does anyone have any experience with simple e-commerce solutions? My optician client wants to start selling sunglasses online

I’ve recommended the usual suspects – Actinic LE, EROL Small Business etc. Any other suggestions or hard-learnt lessons would be appreciated, I’m sure.

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Comments

0 responses to “Ecommerce software experiences”

  1. Tony Kiernan

    Not very useful, but: I spent two years of my life working on the Psion store using an off the shelf application (then they decided to stop selling hardware). For the life of me I cannot remember what it was.

  2. David Stewart

    Choose carefully. There have been some really bad ones, such as OScommerce – thankfully now defunct – and its various forks.

    Even some commercial offerings have problems with templating, SEO, usability, restrictive emarketing hooks, etc..

    One VERY promising open source newcomer is Magento:
    http://www.magentocommerce.com/

  3. Tim McGuiness

    It’s really hard to give good advice without know their goals. I am going to assume that it’s to get a decent web site online and take orders from people they know and a few people they don’t.

    I would strongly suggest a hosted solution. They are cheap, decent and easy to run.

    Here are a few: Volusion, Yahoo Stores and Monster Commerce. (I like Volusion best – Yahoo has the most supporters)

    Getting in front of buyers is going to be an issue, so they may also want to look at marketworks (now part of channel advisor) because it has links into marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Pricegrabber, Shopping.com etc.

    If they are looking to take over the world and do this in a big way, then they should come talk to me :)

  4. Stephen

    Thanks all. Probably should have made it a bit clearer, but they already have a site, that I built, it’s mostly static ‘TML (bit of PHP but no database). So the look ‘n feel already been decided, in a way. But maybe I can talk them into a hosted solution. If not, I’ll send them to Tim, I really don’t have time to do this myself…

  5. Ben

    Didn’t realise Oscommerce.com was now defunct?

    Magento looks like it’ll be a cracker.

  6. David Stewart

    OSC has changed little in the past 5+ years. v2.2 still has that horrendous architecture, spag bol code and table-based HTML layout.

    You are quite right – OSC v3 is still ‘on the way’ but long-term alpha. I don’t know how much of a re-write it is, but any connection with the previous version will drag it down.

    Magento seems to be a fresh take on eCommerce/CMS – modern code and architecture, lessons learned!