Thanka Teraside. I know the current site is shocking, hence the reason I need to have a new one done
I have looked at using ZenCart, CubeCart and osCommerce all before and tested them, they are all good and easy to use however, I find the manual input of each product ridiculously frustrating.
I would seriously look into doing an online shop if there was a simple code/add on I could use that would auto-import from excel lists (supplier pricelists). That would be a huge help. If it means I have to sit there and plug in every item seperately to make sales, then I guess I would do it - but if there is an easier way, I'd like to know?
@ Teraside - know of anyone who could do a design around osCommerce/CubeCart? I've looked at online templates - but quite honestly would prefer a custom design.
As Teraside said, if you want any specific advice, ask me and I can help you out ... I believe we need to help each other out, there are more than enough customers out there, we can all share
... which is why I'm going to RAGE with Nivo (We're sharing a 24m2 stand
) ... don't bother with the bigger players though, I have been told off many times when asking for advice ... business is business
.
A big word of advice though ... do not use
www.estart.co.za ... they have a great designer, but they have useless service ... took them 5 months to complete my site, when it should've taken 1 ... I paid my deposit in October and was promised a site by end of november, I got it on the last day of Feb when I threatened to take my business elsewhere. Now there are still many bugs remaining, and he refuses to reply to my e-mails, so I am stuck trying to fix these bugs on my own, with little experience with the how CRE Loaded works as opposed to osCommerce (The template system is confusing).
In terms of the manual importing, its painful and frustrating, but once you have a full pricelist in, its not so bad ... I upload all the pricelists, and I have a school student uploading the pictures and descriptions ... although I have made excel macros that will upload pricelists for me, however I have to upload each manufacturer and category separately which is what takes forever ... I wish I knew how to program well enough to create an AI script that will detect categories and manufacturers ... but its not gonna happen any time soon
In terms of e-commerce systems, Magento is awesome, and I would like to move to it someday because it is very advanced, however at the same time, it is still too new and hence a bit more time consuming ... for example, if you use CREloaded or osCommerce, you can download a program called osCommerce Manager or MagneticOne store manager which speeds up a lot of the things, whereas with Magento this is not available yet, so everything is website based ... and also, it is lacking many features I believe to be essential, and there are not enough contributions out there. Unless you can afford to pay a website programmer to create these features in Magento for you, give it another year or so ... once these features become available, and there is a successful script to convert from CRE Loaded, I will then make the move ... it is an awesome system.
Hope this helps a bit.
Regards
Itai
