Help me with suggestions on the backend (admin) issues.

[FunGuy]

Hi,

Want to implement a social ecommerce site. It is a fishing site with an ability for users to have their profiles, upload photos and also this site should have an ability for those users to buy fishing equipment. But still cant decided on the business logic:

1. Develop backend (including cart) from scratch what would be able to store and fulfill orders+ quickbooks for accounting.

2. Take an open source cart and upgrade it to our needs (add features like photo uploads evaluation, affiliation and etc. What cart would you suggest? When this cart should have the ability to store and fulfill orders+ quickbooks for accounting.

3. Take a simple open source or build from scratch a simple cart with extra features that we need like photo submissions evaluation (we do not need porn on our site) and use a third party inventory system like fishbowl+quickbooks for accounting.

4. Your best suggestion here.

You will help me very much if you will let me know what would you do in my situation.

Thank you.

 

[StevieT]

Are you more interesting in building a social site with online sales to fund it, or to build an e-commerce site with the social site to attract potential purchasers?

Whichever way around the key to success (IMHO) is to get the volume of visitors daily frequenting the site, that should be the initial prime objective. Adding the e-commerce is probaly the easier part.

Making the site attractive and "sticky" is the harder part. Key question for you to address: How will you create ever changing content that will attract viewers back, if its not interesting fishing content, then I guess it needs to be competitive pricing...

 

[Astaroth]

The four options really are:

1) Bespoke the whole thing

2) Off the shelf one and bespoke the other

3) Off the shelf both and mash together

4) Use a CMS and add compatible components for both

At the end of the day it will depend on how bespoke you really want the two elements to be and how blended. Certainly option 4 is the easiest to accomplish but gives you the least control over the end product. Option 1 is the hardest to do and most expensive but will give you exactly what you want without compromise.

Whilst it may be sensible to think which the priority is out of the two elements the technical difficulties may change which one you build and which you acquire if you are going for option 2