an e-commerce solution

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zamrg

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I've been planning to start a online shop for some time, selling a specific set of products and not a general purpose site or competitor to the already big names.

I'm looking for some advice from a graphic design and a php developer point of view.

I could either use a fully functional open source online shop such as Magento or PrestaShop. They are both all-in-one, ready to use packages and have quite a large range of custom plugins available. The problem is that the site I want to develop will have quite a bit of custom coding needed, and both these packages are quite complex to learn, especially when it comes to heavy customising.

This leaves me with the alternative of building a custom solution, most likely using a php framework. I've never used a php framework, but from what I've read, Symfony and CodeIgniter are both pretty complex and powerful frameworks. I'm leaning towards CodeIgniter as it is a well written MVC framework, and it comes with quite a lot of general purposes libraries (e-mailing, pdf, security, etc) which would save a lot of coding.

The other problem I have is my lack of graphic design skills :) I'm thinking of purchasing a xhtml/css e-commerce template, and then having a friend, who's a graphic designer, modifiy it here and there where need be.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with building an e-commerce solution, whether one used a paid/open source package or built a custom system from scratch/using a framework. I also need to find a good place to purchase a template, but the ones available online are pretty crappy and relatively pricy.
 
I was the server-side part of a 3-man team that wrote an ecommerce system from scratch back in 2000. It's not a simple task, to be sure. You're going about this in the right way though.

I would go with the design template idea, for a start. CodeIgniter is awesome, and there are samples out there that will get you going in most areas - and they have a vibrant community too. I've played with it a bit, and was impressed with the ease of use it brought with it. If you are going to customise heavily, you may as well build from scratch, as you'd have to learn the code anyway.
 
Raithlin said:
I was the server-side part of a 3-man team that wrote an ecommerce system from scratch back in 2000. It's not a simple task, to be sure. You're going about this in the right way though.

I would go with the design template idea, for a start. CodeIgniter is awesome, and there are samples out there that will get you going in most areas - and they have a vibrant community too. I've played with it a bit, and was impressed with the ease of use it brought with it. If you are going to customise heavily, you may as well build from scratch, as you'd have to learn the code anyway.
Click to expand...

ye, I understand the hefty job at hand from starting from scratch. I am however having 2nds thoughts about doing so as I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I've been playing around with Magento, which so far appears to be an awesome open source e-commerce project. I'm gonna have a look at their API and see if it could be worth learning and customising.
 
Open Source and Off the Shelf e-Commerce solutions can look great in the beginning but is a pain in the ass when you want it to do something your company needs.

I've spent the better part of the past year customizing a VPASP cart for someone who refused to see my (what, 11 years experience?) point to start their system from scratch with what they want from the beginning.

Now that they're using this pre-bought-customized software, they want more customizations, more flexibility... all this for something that could have done properly the first time around and would have speed up development and push down cost so much they could have been happy already. But instead, they think that adding a field would magically be changed everywhere and automatically show up on the invoice... (extra shipping charges for example)

So I'd think long and hard about what you want. What you need as a company. And then once you have that, try looking into a crystal ball and figure out what your future-you would need or want from a system like that, and if so, how easy it is to change before you make a decision to buy or use software written to accommodate 10938902938439184182 different people and businesses
 
AcidRaZor said:
Open Source and Off the Shelf e-Commerce solutions can look great in the beginning but is a pain in the ass when you want it to do something your company needs.

I've spent the better part of the past year customizing a VPASP cart for someone who refused to see my (what, 11 years experience?) point to start their system from scratch with what they want from the beginning.

Now that they're using this pre-bought-customized software, they want more customizations, more flexibility... all this for something that could have done properly the first time around and would have speed up development and push down cost so much they could have been happy already. But instead, they think that adding a field would magically be changed everywhere and automatically show up on the invoice... (extra shipping charges for example)

So I'd think long and hard about what you want. What you need as a company. And then once you have that, try looking into a crystal ball and figure out what your future-you would need or want from a system like that, and if so, how easy it is to change before you make a decision to buy or use software written to accommodate 10938902938439184182 different people and businesses
Click to expand...

thanks for the advice

I was having this exact problem deciding on whether to start from scratch and hence allow for complete control and customisation, or use an already open source solution, learn how the system works, and then customise it.

I landed up going the custom route, but am taking this project slowly, allowing me to learn CodeIgniter from the beginning and hopefully build on my knowledge for future projects.

The CI e-commerce tutorial which Raithlin posted has been a great start :)
 
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