New website neede - with powerful product filter and review system

[aquazoo]

Hi all

I need a website which can do the below things. Does anyone know of any off the shelf products that can do some or all of the below? Our max budget for this is around £5k. Any advice/comments welcome.

1) DATABASE
- Holds database of products and services: The fields that the database captures needs to be customisable by myself without me doing any coding

- Customers can add their own reviews of the products/services on our site, including a 5 star overall rating (a bit like amazon)

- Visitors to our site can have the ability to pick 2 or 3 similar products and compare their characteristics. E.g. customer filters by
product type "toaster" which are the colour "red" sold only in "London." Then the visitor can sort by data type: e.g. the products with the highest customer star rating appear at the top of his filtered list.

The database is not going to be very large as we are focussing on quite a niche area.

2) CUSTOMER REVIEW SYSTEM
As touched on above customers will need to be able to review products and give a star rating, this will then need to automatically feed into the above database

3) PAY-PER-CLICK
When customers choose a product to purchase they will be taken from our website to the company website selling the product. For participating companies we would like to earn revenue from each customer who gets transferred from our site to the company site.

4) GOOD BACKEND FUNCTIONALITY
I want a reliable and powerful Admin area to the site so I can change things on the site myself without coding, not rely on someone else to make the changes.

Give me a shout if you want more info or anything unclear. All thoughts welcome.

Kind regards
Dominic

P.s. I will put a tender out on this site once I have done a bit more research, but feel free to PM me with links to sites you have built which do some or all of the above.

[Jonathan Hathaway]

I would suggest your budget may be a little tight for an off-the-shelf solution, however I am confident an independent developer would be able to provide much of what you require. Alternatively, check out EKM, Actinic or 3EX.NET Pro by Exact Abacus.

[aquazoo]

Thanks, I will check those out. Yes budget is quite tight, I would also consider a fixed price bespoke job if I could see the firm had done something similar before.

[janice171]

Hi Aquazoo

I've PM'd you with some details which I hope will be of some help.

Cheers

Janice

[Naughty Vend]

I would suggest your budget is, 'drum roll' too high mate... :)

Actinic Business (£799) + Codepath Soapbox (£149) will do everything on your list apart from the PPC, it's a template driven system using code snippets so you can dynamically edit your site which does take some getting used to if you have no knowledge of web stuff. The PPC you should think about as ultimately it's business off your site, consider drop ship partners and yes there's code for that too where you list the inventory and keep the cash with your specified margin (not a piddley affiliate share) and external data sources are possible for administration. However if you want PPC add affiliate banners to your site code from one of the many...

Just let Andy at Codepath know you were speaking with Dave from Naughty Vend, his page is http://www.codepath.co.uk and there are other good plug-ins for Actinic available too, not just from Andy...

Good luck, watch out for the fish with pointy teeth in these waters.

[janice171]

Hi

NVI is right, 5k is a big budget for ecommerce if you're going to use an open source or off the shelf solution. A completely bespoke system could set you back a bit more.
I personally have worked with a few different ecommerce packages but have found OsCommerce to be the best of the bunch in terms of intuitive administration and features.
I would typically completely re-skin OSC and build it to the latest web standards so it's SEO friendly and tailored to suit the business image, but it really does come feature packed straight out of the box.
At the end of the day, design sells so which ever product you opt for make sure it's a quality design suited to your business and also that you have a site that is coded to be forward compatible with all major browsers and is web standards compliant.

Hope that helps

Janice

[QT CREATIVE]

Hi


My company QT, can provide the website which you are looking for.

I would love the opportunity to give you a call and/or come to meet you and discuss your requirements.

Please get in touch and we can discuss your requirements further.

Kindest regards

Gavin
07969 507903

[bestforsextoys]

I would suggest your budget is, 'drum roll' too high mate... :)

Actinic Business (£799) + Codepath Soapbox (£149) will do everything on your list apart from the PPC, it's a template driven system using code snippets so you can dynamically edit your site which does take some getting used to if you have no knowledge of web stuff. The PPC you should think about as ultimately it's business off your site, consider drop ship partners and yes there's code for that too where you list the inventory and keep the cash with your specified margin (not a piddley affiliate share) and external data sources are possible for administration. However if you want PPC add affiliate banners to your site code from one of the many...

Just let Andy at Codepath know you were speaking with Dave from Naughty Vend, his page is http://www.codepath.co.uk and there are other good plug-ins for Actinic available too, not just from Andy...

Good luck, watch out for the fish with pointy teeth in these waters.

I would not go with him as his site is not good so please do not waste your money for the backend

Thanks
Austin

[aquazoo]

Thanks all, especially NVI for a very good suggestion which does a fair bit of what I want.

Anyone else know of other Star Review Systems I could use?

( I use OS Commerce for another one of my website which is great - and taught me the benefits of Off The Shelf, but I don't think it can do what I want in this case.)

Cheers, Dominic

P.s. To all those sending offers of work, thanks for the info, but I'm only interested if you have done something similar before.