Tips on building a e-commerce site?

July 11, 2005 7:49 AM

Tips on building an e-commerce site?

I have the opportunity to build a web site for a small, start-up company. While I have built several web sites before, this will be the first time that I'll build one involving a shopping cart, credit card processing, etc. I have looked into Paypal's shopping cart/merchant gateway and it seems promising.

So ... I am looking for tips, suggestions and advice geared towards someone who is new at this. The company sells soy-based candles and small gift items if that makes any difference. Thanks.

posted by Ostara to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Check out OsCommerce - pretty much everything you could ask for in a commerce site, free and open source.
posted by Gortuk at 8:03 AM on July 11, 2005

Web wunderkinder 37 Signals put together some holiday tips for e-commerce sites that are mostly applicable to non-holiday shopping.
posted by revgeorge at 8:45 AM on July 11, 2005

Second for osCommerce. It's a tad ugly out of the box, but nice things can be made with tweaks to the HTML / CSS files. It's VERY full-featured, btw -- it can handle many kinds of payments and you (the admin) can turn on and off whichver ones you need.

It's not very slick yet (themes and stuff), but version 2 is coming soon.
posted by zpousman at 12:46 PM on July 11, 2005

I'm working with osCommerce right now and agree with some other people's comments. it's fairly painless start up and seems to work well, though it lacks some good handholding for the steps between initial config and being fully running. No good "for example" cases for, say, setting up a store that sells Widgets and 7 manufacturers with 4 models each and 3 color choices for each one.
posted by phearlez at 1:46 PM on July 11, 2005

ZenCart is a fork of osCommerce that some people (like me) prefer.
posted by spilon at 3:48 PM on July 11, 2005