Client wants E Commerce, In Over My Head.

[bclouatre]

So heres the scoop, my client wants a ecommerce site, its pretty much charity work. Now to the catch.

I have never, ever, ever even sneezed e commerce. I can obviously code and all that jazz as i normally specialize in web design with CSS/Jquery etc.

This may sound a little hectic but i am totally in over my head and looking for help.

a) I don’t know what e commerce software to use it has to be free or pretty much next to free
b) it has to be fairly easy to learn for someone who is tech savvy (i can code html/css/javascript php i know a bit but its very very week)
c) I know how to set up databases and all that but i would require a interface for adding/removing products
d) How would i go about controlling inventory? the person would have say 3 items in store to ship out would the program know this? would it update dynamically?
5) payment, how/where/why

Any and all info on the subject you can give to help me out of this bind would be amazing. I am a few more failed attempts away from giving up the contract.

[theplastickid]

I would recommend using Joomla.

I went to Lynda website and followed a few tutorials on it there and a week later I could build with it. There are plenty of extensions on offer for e-commerce as well. Shouldn’t take you longer than a week to learn Joomla and its a skill you’ll hold on to for the future so definatly worth it.

[Matt]

I say go look at Magento. It’s heavy on smaller or shared servers, but it is fully feature complete in terms of e-commerce.

EDIT

"bclouatre" wrote:

a) I don’t know what e commerce software to use it has to be free or pretty much next to free
b) it has to be fairly easy to learn for someone who is tech savvy (i can code html/css/javascript php i know a bit but its very very week)
c) I know how to set up databases and all that but i would require a interface for adding/removing products
d) How would i go about controlling inventory? the person would have say 3 items in store to ship out would the program know this? would it update dynamically?
5) payment, how/where/why

a) this is it
b) as long as the person can grasp e-commerce, they can grasp this. If they can’t understand some marketing terms, I don’t see why they should be diving into this.
c) Magento will do everything for you
d) Magento tracks inventory and will alert you over RSS when the inventory is low.
e) Magento has built-in mechagnisms for handling payments. You can use PayPal (default) or you can go further and use others such as STAR, etc. I think the bigger card handlers are only available on the Enterprise edition (only one I’ve ever worked on commercially), but I think the community edition can do plenty for the small business or non-profit.

[Matt]

"xheathen" wrote:

Be aware that many localhosts have tons of problems when installing Magento, so it can be frustrating from a test perspective. However, it seems to install OK on an actual web server.

Go to <magento directory>appcodecoreMageCoreModelSessionAbstractVarien.php

Comment out the lines:

Code:

$this->getCookie()->getDomain(),
$this->getCookie()->isSecure(),
$this->getCookie()->getHttponly()

So it looks like:

Code:

// set session cookie params
session_set_cookie_params(
$this->getCookie()->getLifetime(),
$this->getCookie()->getPath()
//$this->getCookie()->getDomain(),
//$this->getCookie()->isSecure(),
//$this->getCookie()->getHttponly()
);

[Author]

Posts