Professional E-commerce Solution

[Ali-v-8]

Hi ecashking,

Been reading this post and was wondering what you want to achieve.
Are you looking to have a bespoke website built?
Should you "only" be looking at open source?
Have you checked with your payment gateway what they accept?
Your budget. Does it include SEO?

Your expectation to pay more with a professional company sounds like you have already been misled.
The key fact still remains you get what you pay for.
You must outline everything that you want and then tender that out.
Dont give budget and ask what people can do with it.

Pm me the brief and i will be happy to give you an offer.

Thank you for all the posts and useful comments. I have been researching on all the suggestions made and would be grateful if anyone could answer the below questions:

1) I note the comments regarding getting a open source solution and then getting someone to customise it, below are problems I see regarding this:

- As we have a retail store, we would need integration with an epos system as well. I do not see a ready solution which provides this.

- We also plan to sell on Amazon marketplace, are there any open source solutions which integrate with this fully i.e. importing orders so inventory is managed on one database? Entering product information, and this uploads onto Amazon and our website.

- Also in our market place, we would need a automatic repricing solution for Amazon and repricing the website at the same time.

- Advanced features, such as Email marketing campaigns, with measurement of response, conversion etc


I feel that with open source, although it can be customised, the extent of the customisations will be limited to the specifications I provide, which is limited to the knowledge I have of what can be achieved.

My feeling is going with a professional company, and paying slightly more (maybe not as much as the budget) we will able to use to expertise to grow faster with their experience rather than learning along the way? Correct me if I am wrong?

Thank you for your comments on this.

 

[capeplates]

I've been a web developer for 12 years and I do a lot of ecommerce work - here is what I honestly think.

Bespoke packages can be great if your needs are very specific. The problem with bespoke is that ecommerce websites are usually large in nature and are complex - hence a project from scratch is a big undertaking. A large codebase needs a lot of testing and updating the site in future will be expensive because you are tied into aa custom solution.

Off the shelf packages can be great. As long as your needs are pretty standard there are some great open source packages out there. Try magento, it's the new boy on the block but it's great (and it's free).

Other systems like OSCommerce and Zen Cart are pretty good, and I quite like Tradingeye if your needs are small.

Either way 30K is easily enough to setup a good ecommerce site and promote it via SEO/PPC.

Hope this helps!

 

[edmondscommerce]

- As we have a retail store, we would need integration with an epos system as well. I do not see a ready solution which provides this.

Do you have a particular EPOS system in mind?

how advanced do you need the system to be?

- We also plan to sell on Amazon marketplace, are there any open source solutions which integrate with this fully i.e. importing orders so inventory is managed on one database? Entering product information, and this uploads onto Amazon and our website.

Amazon have an API for handling this kind of thing. There are a few companies out there offering services for this. Amazon also offer something called AMTU which is a little Java app that can be installed on the server and handles the integration side of things nicely.

Whether you choose to integrate directly with Magento or with an ERP system is up to you, openERP is good and there is an existing Magento integration.

- Also in our market place, we would need a automatic repricing solution for Amazon and repricing the website at the same time.

This is more complex but doable, I favour a screen scraping approach to get as much info as possible. I prefer to set up a separate VPS to handle this task which then reports back to the main system.

- Advanced features, such as Email marketing campaigns, with measurement of response, conversion etc

for email marketing, check out Mail Chimp. There is an awesome API which is easy enough to integrate with according to you specific requirements

I feel that with open source, although it can be customised, the extent of the customisations will be limited to the specifications I provide, which is limited to the knowledge I have of what can be achieved.

My advice is not to try to spend your whole budget in one go, with one almighty specification.

Better to break the project up into logical sections as this gives you the opportunity to revise requirements and keeps everything as flexible as possible.

 

[ukbf0001]

Personally for ecommerce I would NOT go bespoke, if you do that you are then tied into the company or individual that developed the software.So your choices are either open source carts or paid carts. Again I would go down the paid cart option, open source is fine (I still use some) but for the sake of a few hundred - it nices to also know you have a large support forum community and professional support if you want to pay for it (you can get that with open source carts as well - this is just my opinion. For a website - depends what you want - do you need static site , or do you a CMS type setup - or do you just need a e-commerce site ?

I have just been through all of this, and more, including all the SEO. Now have a site, +e-commerce, and I am google page1 for the keywords the client wanted. If you want to talk more then PM me

 

[rickyhelmore]

Hi ecashking,

I am interested to work with you, but first I want to know the base line of your business.

Regards