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Webfunk

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Hey guys,

I have a client that wants an online store, but I'm baffled by the amount of options to choose from....zen cart, prestashop, etc etc.

So far Prestashop sounds pretty good...but I'm curious if this client of mine will be able to make updates to products themselves or will they need me to do everything for them?

I've never ventured into eCommerce before, so this is definitely unfamiliar territory. Just looking for advise for...

1. Can the client manage the store themselves with Prestashop, or if not, can someone suggest something else.
2. What' the going price for an eCommerce site these days? My client wants a static 4 or 5 page site, but with a shopping cart as well for about 100 products.

Thanks in advance!

Ben
 
As far as I know:

Wordpress is the best, simplest, most affordable (free *not including Premium theme), largest CMS in the world & easy to use for the designer (you) & the consumer.

You can also:

- Add widgets i.e polls, subscribe forms, etc easily & most of the time free if you just need the basics.

Disadvantages:

- No where near as beautiful, in my opinion, as magento & prestashop.

I like presta because of the product in motion when you click add. It's also quite easy to add products etc but I'm not sure about it being good for anything else besides just a shop.

-Disadvantage to presta: Nothing like wordpress in regards to flexibility & add-ons.

Magento:

Very niceeeeeeeee, very powerful, takes a lot of space, much more time needs to be invested & can take a while to get things going with it but when it's done = WOW.

My opinion from a CMS point of view with e-commerce apart of it:

1. Wordpress
2. Presta
3. Magento (ebay owns them so you know it's good)
 
Any the systems you mentioned will allow you client to add products via a CMS. I would suggest giving them all a quick trial.

Price should depend on a number of factors including level of customisation required.

If you like, PM me and I'll take a look at your quote.
 
eCommerce is incredibly complex in my opinion... and I have one :D (opinion that is)

There are differences between shopping carts that organically built as a shopping cart and allow plugins either for free or third party purchase.

A CMS is generally built around different criteria and it's purpose is often for managing content that requires more than just a blog.

Wordpress in my opinion is a great blog, that's about it. I use it myself, as well as now installing my new magento /lightspeed server.

What you need to ask your clients is very specific questions about delivery - how are their products going to be delivered as that to me has been the one sticking point on different ecommerce solutions.

Shipping can be an interesting thing to calculate and take hours to get the algorithms or structure correct depending on product type.

Then there is the design element - if they have some custom design, then you need decide which store is able to be themed as close to your client's requirements.

You can buy an off the shelf design for magento for about 150.00 and it's pretty slick and your time is spent learning about how to put the store together rather than making it look fancy.

I am not as much of a fan of wordpress for shopping carts, as it's like me trying to make blog out of a shopping cart app - it's not quite designed to do that and if you are new to something and it's a learning curve for both, perhaps using a standard off the shelf shopping cart that you know works well - and there are free and well priced commercial ones to choose from, with some support mechanism to help you overcome your initial learning phase, then you should still remain friends at the end of the project.

Although I have no issues with wordpress - I think for a beginner to both, it has some quirks that might not make the wordpress experience as pleasant as it could be. If you are a wordpress guru- then that's another story.

Also, time constraints - ecommerce generally takes longer to put together than a standard website.

However, it's a very rewarding area - I love it. It's incredibly challenging but the outcomes are very nice.

In the olden days, back in 2001 > 2002 - I had this fabulous email marketing and ecommerce app which my guys wrote - it was so slick. People could buy a product, and then the vendor could transpose the purchasers details into the email app, and it would email them and upsell and cross sell.

What I learnt from that expensive exercise was... wait until the world is ready. *sigh* I really liked that idea... but I spent more time telling people what ecommerce was and what email marketing was and there were not enough people going online to sell. And then on April 16? 2000 I believe we had the .com gone crash V1 and people were scared. It's a different world now.

If I were you and new, I'd take up the offer of having your quote looked at - it could save you some headaches.

And I like cs-cart as well - it's quite a beautiful product.

That's my penny's worth. :-)

Nina
 
nina said:
Wow, it's Cold Fusion - Not many cold fusion sites around are there?

Nina
Click to expand...

ColdFusion still has quite a big following but certainly nowhere near that of the PHP/.Net coder base. How it compares to Ruby and all those other weird languages and frameworks, who knows.

In this case, since it's a hosted store it doesn't really matter what language it's written in anyway as long as it works well, is secure, etc.

Edit: I'd personally opt for a hosted solution like BigCommerce or Shopify as it's super quick to get up and running and the barrier of entry cost-wise is very low.
 
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nina said:
Wow, it's Cold Fusion - Not many cold fusion sites around are there?

Nina
Click to expand...

I'm not a technical person Nina, so I can't really answer this intelligently!

Suffice to say, it seems to work well and has a huge following around the world. They've also been in business for ages, and their service and backup is pretty darn good.

By the way, I did PM you the other day re your auDA question.
 
Hey, Nina. Yes, our solution is built using the Coldfusion language. Although the language is nowhere near as popular as PHP/.Net, the important thing is that it works. :-)

As Nova rightly pointed out, since this is a hosted solution, it really doesn't matter what language was used to create the solution. You don't need to know any Coldfusion or even HTML to create a beautiful online store using the InstanteStore solution.

The best thing would be for you to try it out yourself. It literally takes just a few minutes and with our 30-day free trial, you can check it out just by filling in a simple form.

http://www.instantestore.com/free_trial.cfm

Actually, we just launched our new price plans and you can get a store starting from only US$14.97/month. And we've just launched our "mobile commerce" module that's included in every single plan... even the cheapest one.

I hope this helps to throw some light on the matter.

Ben: My advice to you would be to take an hour or so to try out a few different solutions, especially the hosted ones. See which one you like. Each solution has its own advantages but ultimately you just have to be comfortable with the one you choose.

Neddy: Thanks for vouching for us. Really appreciate it. For someone who's been using InstanteStore since WAY back (was it 2006 or even earlier, Ned?), those are kind words indeed. Thanks!
 
Yeah... definitely heard of Volusion! They're one of InstanteStore's close competitors.... If you have the time, do check out our 30 day free trial as well or the demo store that we have online. I would love to hear your feedback, Designer!
 
@Charles - had a look and may give it a whirl. Volusion seems to be ticking all the boxes for me at the moment though.
 
Does anyone know of a store that can handle a csv data feed.

Looking at 5000+ products.

Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks.

Edit: Looks like magento can handle this.
 
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I have been hearing some negative things about Magento recently...A few guys said it was a really slow solutions and that Big Commerce was a better option to take up...

Any one have any thoughts about that?

I have been working with a few clients who have .net ASP shopping software, can say it is not the best.
 
Magento is not slow if on the correct environment. We're talking about caching and having enough resources. On a shared environment, usually not that great and only good for mum and pop stores. Magento has scalability that many other opensource and even paid solutions do not have.
 
Webfunk said:
Hey guys,

I have a client that wants an online store, but I'm baffled by the amount of options to choose from....zen cart, prestashop, etc etc.

...

Thanks in advance!

Ben
Click to expand...


Hi Ben,

I've had a good look around at shopping carts, and for my purposes Magento comes out on top, mainly as it can integrate with Joomla, and seems pretty good overall with a relatively attractive default template. It can also be configured for a variety of Paypal account types.

I've heard grumbling that it's a memory hog, and can get very slow on occasions. Also it seems to be a little overly complicated with the code structure, and can take some time to customise (if you want to change a lot of things).

In my case I won't be customising much more than the template, which is pretty straightforward.

It seems that Ebay/Paypal are acquiring Magento, and so it's future development seems more sure than some others. The only downside may be that the cart will likely (?) become inseparable from the payment gateway.


http://gigaom.com/2011/06/06/ebay-acquires-magento-builds-a-commerce-os/

http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/ebay-agrees-to-acquire-magento/

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscent...o_to_boost_its_ecommerce_developer_tools.html

.
 
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I've just had built our new Magento and email marketing server (sooooo slick.. I just love it)

It has been in my observation that no matter what ecommerce app you choose, there is a point of performance, cost, value for money and investment in the technology that runs ecommerce.

Lack of knowledge on how to run the software, inability to understand how to optimise the site in reference to how the store should be setup is another thing.

There are good and bad in most applications. I do although feel that the purchase of Magento by eBay *sigh* is disappointing. It seems that everyone has their price I guess.

I can't see that there will be any reason for the other already existing payment gateways to not be available.

Bigcommerce is focussing on their business model too and I feel that detracts from development of the platform whereas magento is still open source and you can do alot with the free download and third party add ins.

Even if they stopped developing magento from today, it is still a viable product to use.

Personally I use dotnetnuke, and add third party shopping cart which is not perfect but it's very reliable, and it's upgrade path have been appealing to me, so I have some clients who have been using this store since 2005 and six years on, they have been upgraded to the latest version of the cms and shopping cart, without too much pain.

So many choices, and to say one is definitively better is a tall order because it depends on what the plans are for the ecommerce project in the first place.

Nina
 
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