Learning E-Commerce

May 16th, 2009

For those of you who don’t know, e-commerce is usually a painful and expensive part of web design. Most of the popular systems are ancient table based relics that should have been abandoned long ago. Because of this, designers tend to hate building e-commerce stores. Thankfully, things are starting to slowly change. There are a ton of great new options that make running an online store easy, fast, and fun.

The Hard Part

The biggest problem with online stores is customizability. Even the simplest of changes can require days of custom, advanced level programming. Systems like osCommerce and ZenCart are especially hard to use, and we’ve decided to avoid any projects requiring these technologies. This also makes life easier for our clients, as both of the above systems have a huge learning curve and require significant training before they can be used effectively.

Making E-Commerce Fun

Some of the easiest and modern e-commerce solutions are “hosted”. This means that the actual store resides on an external server rather than your own website. Hosted solutions are not for everyone, but they do make e-commerce easy to use and design for. Two of the cart systems we have been looking at are:

  • Shopify – “A shop in minutes, a business for life” ($24 a month, 2% transaction fee)
  • FoxyCart – “Foxycart is different” ($15 a month, no transaction fee)

Both these systems make it a breeze to setup and run stores, and for less than $30 a month it’s a steal.

Bigger Stores

For bigger stores that don’t want a hosted solution, there are two systems that we are currently working with. Both of them require significant investment to get started, but they are serious stores that can become real money makers.

We make no secret that we love developing for wordpress, so the Wordpress E-Commerce plugin was automatically a great choice for us. Although it definitely has limitations, it’s probably one of the easiest systems to use . Add to this the fact that it is integrated right into wordpress and you have an E-Commerce solution that makes a lot of sense.

Montreal Magento Design ThemeFor larger projects we have decided to develop with Magento. An open source system that was developed for enterprise level stores. A word of warning to anyone who wants to work with Magento; it’s a really huge system that requires significant training. It is meant for people who want to run a large-scale online store in multiple languages. However, it offers near unlimited flexibility and has a growing community of developers who are constantly adding new functionality.