Online retail help needed

January 30, 2004 2:18 PM

Has anyone got specific recommendations or gripes about "retail e-commerce solutions"? (more inside)

The site would probably look to generate around £500,000 in Year 1 rising to £5M in Year 3, and it's low value high volume stuff. It's an existing business with a pretty high turnover, but no web presence, and no great level of technical expertise. Looking at external build and then subsequent management in house. Scalability and CMS are key issues.

posted by johnny novak to Shopping (2 answers total)

I used Intershop 3 back in the day, and it was a bloated piece of crap. I've heard it's gotten much better, though.

If you have the time, rolling your own in mod_perl only takes a few months.
posted by cmonkey at 4:04 PM on January 30, 2004

You might want to look into Interchange... it was started by a company called Akopia under the product name TallyMan, but Akopia was bought by RedHat and their project merged with another open source e-commerce project or two. It was built by some of the original ShopSite team (of which I was one). I'll also mention that I was briefly involved with Akopia, too, and had mixed feelings about the TallyMan project -- even as a programmer I found some things unecessarily complex, some of the metaphors hard to get my head around. But it was designed to be scalable and it's open source, so therefore hackable to your needs. There were a few other similarly positioned open source packages at the time, too... can't remember much, though.
posted by weston at 4:42 PM on January 30, 2004