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Achives 2012
e-commerce website, room for one more?
Posted on Friday, 24 June 2011 by nestor in Technology
Have you ever wanted to put an online shop? What were your options? Did you find an ecommerce website solution that didn't need a programmer to implement it for you, and so keep costs low?
Type in Google "ecommerce", and you get:
- Magento
- osCommerce
- Drupal
Type "shopping cart", and you get:
- Interspire
- Zen-cart
- OpenCart
Yet, when you are a normal individual, with limited website skills, there are no many choices there for you, unless you hire a web programmer that do it for you, and then the Open Source is not free anymore, and sometimes the cost of implementing an ecommerce site is higher than building it from scratch.
Problem with all these e-commerce / shopping cart websites, is that they try to offer all options to all kind of users with all kind of needs, then, in order to provide flexibility so everyone can have the unique site they need, the user interface gets unnecessary complex.
After you download it, and try to install it, you get lost between tens or hundreds of possible options. So, we are taking on an own project to develop a new (yes, one more) e-commerce / shopping cart website.
Our idea for this website is, allow an average person to put his online shop in minutes, at very affordable prices. To achieve this, we are evaluating what options are most needed for soho and small businesses (we will not target large companies; those can pay for Magento full package). As per the price, to keep it low and yet pay back our efforts, we are thinking on a hosted solution, but we will also give out something free (still thinking of a way for this).
The login page design is done,... one less page design to worry about!
We are now on the UI design, and here are some main options considered:
- Single currency and multi-currency
- Multi-language (for system only, product data will allow only one language)
- Shipping cost by weight and fixed by product unit
- Multiple shipping companies
- Shipping zones by country, by state/province
- Tax by country and by state/province
- One-level product category
- Products can have multiple categories
- Several pictures per product
- SEO fields
- Color and Size options by product category
- Quantity discount
- Price by size (configurable)
- Stock by product, size, color or any combination
- PayPal, Authorize.NET, off-line payments
- Product export/import (csv format)
- Nice design. Use good graphic design to make a nice control panel, so you will want to login everyday to check your store, just to see that nice roll-over button or that showing/hiding section.
- Simplicity. People must be able to sell products, not to learn how to use software/websites, allow do almost all in one place, without getting lost through many links and options.
- Affordable. Don't take us for wrong, we are not doing this for charity, we also need to make money to have a decent life (I've got a baby, and Sam is waiting for one), but in the way why not allow more people to set their own shop online without paying thousands of dollars? A hosted option seems the best way so far, but we still need to crunch the numbers to have a win-win situation.
Suena bien, estoy interesado, favor de avisar para cuando este listo.