E-commerce Website Platform

[The Moose]

I know this question has been done to death on here, however I'm going to ask it anyway

I'm looking at changing our e-commerce software from what is currently a bespoke mashup of multiple different products to a more streamlined system.

The driving force for this (for me anyway) is to improve our back-office work and hopefully reduce the admin work required and at the same time hopefully add some cool functionality for our customers.

I definitely something that is hosted within an environment I control. Whilst some of the hosted solutions seem fine enough, if they go bust it could be a total disaster. At least if it's hosted within an environment within my control I can just acquire further hosting and restore from a backup (and yes, a restore will be tested regularly!!). This removes a lot of the options talked about on here such as shopify and countless others.

I have looked at Magento and it appears to be rather complicated. We don't have 3 billion products and 6,958 transactions a second and I think this is possibly overkill.

One avenue I am considering venturing down is using WordPress with some e-Commerce plugins. The reason for this is that our site is not only products, but there is also a fair bit of useful content on there doing one thing or another and WordPress is meant to be quite good with content . If it really had to happen, I could have something such as WordPress running the content and something totally different running the shop (e.g. https://shop.domain.com)

My wishlist is as follows (in no particular order):

• Content and E-commerce to sit side by side (preferably in one solution but could live with two if needed)
• An (probably) AJAX shopping basket that is updated without the customer leaving the page they're on
• Single page checkout would be lovely
• Full order/invoice history for the customer in their Account section
• Ability for our sales staff to create orders in our back-end, assign them to a customers account and then allow the customer to log in and pay for that order exactly as configured
• Ability to create invoices from orders
• Stock management (only basic required but stock management as in buy in price for the products that are sold taking into account pricing fluctuations etc)
• Multiple delivery options which are dependant on day of the week, post code etc (e.g. so a Saturday delivery service isn't available to a postcode defined as to be within the highlands or an Irish address has a shipping surcharge etc).
• Interface with our courier systems (Interlink) both for booking in and for customers to track their order
• Each product to have the option of having a pdf associated with them (possibly 1 or 2 pages) which are then all compiled for the customer to download/print for their order - personalised for them
• Templates/themes that allow us to easily make changes to the site, however some pages being able to have different themes (for example a page selling apples may have the green theme, but the page selling oranges has the orange theme etc).

(these are over and above the 'standard' shopping cart requirements of products in categories, discount codes, discount combinations etc etc etc)

The reality is that if I really wanted to, I could sit down and code this all myself from scratch, however I'm not particularly good at the design side of things and am lacking the time just to sit down and code the whole thing.

I look forward to any suggestions (well done for making it this far!!)

[jammy_basturd]

I agree with you on the Magento side of things, unless you're after completely bespoke workflows or custom functionality, then it really is overkill for what most people are using it for.

If I was you I would go down the Wordpress + Woocommerce route. Woocommerce I believe is the fastest growing ecommerce solution and it's now the option I try to use for most of my ecommerce projects unless they start to get complicated or require massive scalability.

This is a Woocommerce site of mine that went live recently after porting their products across from an old custom ecommerce solution. That website satisfies the following of your requirements:

The Moose said:

My wishlist is as follows (in no particular order):

• Content and E-commerce to sit side by side (preferably in one solution but could live with two if needed)
• An (probably) AJAX shopping basket that is updated without the customer leaving the page they're on
• Single page checkout would be lovely
• Full order/invoice history for the customer in their Account section
• Ability for our sales staff to create orders in our back-end, assign them to a customers account and then allow the customer to log in and pay for that order exactly as configured
• Ability to create invoices from orders
• Stock management (only basic required but stock management as in buy in price for the products that are sold taking into account pricing fluctuations etc)
• Templates/themes that allow us to easily make changes to the site, however some pages being able to have different themes (for example a page selling apples may have the green theme, but the page selling oranges has the orange theme etc).

I used a template with that site as it suited their budget and there are some that particular template was exactly the sort of thing they were after, so there was no need for the added expense of a completely custom design.

I'll soon be starting another Woocommerce website for a cycle company that will feature slightly different templates for MTBs and road bikes and then a third template still for Bromptons.

I'm sure there will be extensions available that could fulfil these requirements too:

The Moose said:

• Multiple delivery options which are dependant on day of the week, post code etc (e.g. so a Saturday delivery service isn't available to a postcode defined as to be within the highlands or an Irish address has a shipping surcharge etc).
• Interface with our courier systems (Interlink) both for booking in and for customers to track their order
• Each product to have the option of having a pdf associated with them (possibly 1 or 2 pages) which are then all compiled for the customer to download/print for their order - personalised for them

[Altrezia]

Mr Moose Sir,
We could build you a bespoke system that can do all of that, if you wanted?
Details in my profile

[DSLiverpool]

Carrier - look at GFS as they offer great options and have beaten our already low price plus they do the text stuff and returns via click collect etc.

[The Moose]

Thanks for that jammie, or is it Mr Basturd?

Whilst at first glance there appears to be a lot of nice bits on that website, it's massively geared towards e-commerce - I don't see any content on there. I will however investigate the Woocommerce options. It does appear to me that there's lots of seemingly nice functionality, however it's not all quite right - for example, when you enlarge an image, the pop up is exactly the same size as the initial image. Is this due to the image that was uploaded or functionality issues of the software?

Out of interest, how much did you charge for that site? Feel free to PM if you prefer.

Thanks for your post Altrezia - will drop you a PM shortly.

Any other software recommendations?

[BJG1]

Have a look at Shopify. It's not too expensive, plenty of people out there who can work on it for you and it has a really nice, easy to use back-end.

[The Moose]

BJG1 said:

Have a look at Shopify. It's not too expensive, plenty of people out there who can work on it for you and it has a really nice, easy to use back-end.

Thanks for the recommendation, however I was under the impression that Shopify is a totally hosted solution? I don't want to go down this route as I would prefer to have full control over the site and it's content.

[jammy_basturd]

The Moose said:

Thanks for that jammie, or is it Mr Basturd?

Whilst at first glance there appears to be a lot of nice bits on that website, it's massively geared towards e-commerce - I don't see any content on there. I will however investigate the Woocommerce options. It does appear to me that there's lots of seemingly nice functionality, however it's not all quite right - for example, when you enlarge an image, the pop up is exactly the same size as the initial image. Is this due to the image that was uploaded or functionality issues of the software?

Out of interest, how much did you charge for that site? Feel free to PM if you prefer.

Thanks for your post Altrezia - will drop you a PM shortly.

Any other software recommendations?

The dangers of choosing a username when very young and without any thought to owning your own business in the future!

It is mainly just an ecommerce site, though from the footer you can see there is a video based blog and all the 'Important Links' are just normal Wordpress content pages (and these are just a direct copy from the old site and we haven't yet had a chance to 'spruce' them up a bit). It's easy enough to insert the Woocommerce ecommerce bits and pieces into content pages using the shortcodes: http://docs.woothemes.com/document/woocommerce-sho....

The problem with the image zoom is exactly as you thought - the images they get from Nike are only that big, so unfortunately they don't really zoom when you hover over them. We're in talks with Nike to see if they can provide better images for us.

I'll shoot you a PM this afternoon to discuss financials.

[miniman]

The Moose said:

BJG1 said:

Have a look at Shopify. It's not too expensive, plenty of people out there who can work on it for you and it has a really nice, easy to use back-end.

Thanks for the recommendation, however I was under the impression that Shopify is a totally hosted solution? I don't want to go down this route as I would prefer to have full control over the site and it's content.

Not sure I can see what you need to do that Shopify won't let you, to be honest.

[jammy_basturd]

miniman said:

The Moose said:

BJG1 said:

Have a look at Shopify. It's not too expensive, plenty of people out there who can work on it for you and it has a really nice, easy to use back-end.

Thanks for the recommendation, however I was under the impression that Shopify is a totally hosted solution? I don't want to go down this route as I would prefer to have full control over the site and it's content.

Not sure I can see what you need to do that Shopify won't let you, to be honest.

I believe it's an issue of control.

[BJG1]

Yeah Shopify is fully-hosted although I'd consider why that's an issue for you.

[cuneus]

One of quite a few issues:

[andy-xr]

jammy_basturd said:

miniman said:

The Moose said:

BJG1 said:

Have a look at Shopify. It's not too expensive, plenty of people out there who can work on it for you and it has a really nice, easy to use back-end.

Thanks for the recommendation, however I was under the impression that Shopify is a totally hosted solution? I don't want to go down this route as I would prefer to have full control over the site and it's content.

Not sure I can see what you need to do that Shopify won't let you, to be honest.

I believe it's an issue of control.

Which is nuts when you consider the OP is probably going to be on a vm somewhere in the world, sharing a server with 3000 other sites or sat on dedis in a rack amongst a load of others

[jammy_basturd]

I can't speak for the OP, but if a large part of my company's income was dependant on our ecommerce website then I wouldn't want one sole third party to have complete control over said website.

That includes:

• Hosting and infrastructure
• Integration with payment gateways
• Backend administration
• Analytics (decent analytics only available with Shopify Pro I believe)

Then you're also at the mercy of their monthly pricing structure. They could easily put their charges up 10% overnight, whilst unlikely it's still a risk. If your hosting company did that then you can just move your website to a new server, tiny bit of hassle, but not much and not nearly as much hassle as moving from Shopify to Wordpress several months down the line.

Lastly, you can only customise a Shopify site so far! Anyone who has a website based business should be constantly trying to improve the UX for their customers.

It should be noted that I haven't mentioned costs of Shopify vs a custom solution, for your average ecommerce store I imagine they'll be largely on par over the lifespan of your average website (2-3 years). I did find a rather helpful article going into the costs: http://business.tutsplus.com/articles/shopify-or-n...

[jammy_basturd]

cuneus said:

One of quite a few issues:

Thanks, that banner area is actually meant to hide itself when the resolution gets that narrow. It was working on the Android and iPhone devices we tested it on. Can you let me know what device you're viewing the website on there please?

[andy-xr]

jammy_basturd said:

I can't speak for the OP, but if a large part of my company's income was dependant on our ecommerce website then I wouldn't want one sole third party to have complete control over said website.

That includes:

• Hosting and infrastructure
• Integration with payment gateways
• Backend administration
• Analytics (decent analytics only available with Shopify Pro I believe)

Then you're also at the mercy of their monthly pricing structure. They could easily put their charges up 10% overnight, whilst unlikely it's still a risk. If your hosting company did that then you can just move your website to a new server, tiny bit of hassle, but not much and not nearly as much hassle as moving from Shopify to Wordpress several months down the line.

Lastly, you can only customise a Shopify site so far! Anyone who has a website based business should be constantly trying to improve the UX for their customers.

It should be noted that I haven't mentioned costs of Shopify vs a custom solution, for your average ecommerce store I imagine they'll be largely on par over the lifespan of your average website (2-3 years). I did find a rather helpful article going into the costs: http://business.tutsplus.com/articles/shopify-or-n...

You've missed out (but it could be included in Infrastructure) security. A good sysadmin is worth their weight in gold, especially one who knows how not to fk things up with a LAMP stack and knows dependencies of different versions against front end apps. Also, having the vulnerability assessments and audit trails to show things like pen tests is a great thing, something I'd recommend a fully hosted solution (like Shopify, there's others) for when people arent that knowledgeable or havent the time to complete these tasks themselves.

It's possible to move a site overnight fairly easily if things go wrong, you'd hope that you take incremental and full backups anyway, as well as snapshots. I dont think there's anything wrong with one place for hosting per se, but having some redundancy and a fallback plan incase things go tits does help

[cuneus]

jammy_basturd said:

Thanks, that banner area is actually meant to hide itself when the resolution gets that narrow. It was working on the Android and iPhone devices we tested it on. Can you let me know what device you're viewing the website on there please?

It's an HTC One S (Chrome Browser)
also the same on a Nook HD

the text is also quite a bit off the screen on an Ipad3 (Safari) but not as badly jumbled

[cuneus]

Back on topic

If you have looked at Magento already then that leaves Opencart and Prestashop as well and out of the latter 2 have a look at Opencart

Is this something you intend to implement yourself ?

[The Moose]

As has already been mentioned, what happens if Shopify goes out of business etc?

There's no way I'd allow all aspects of the website to be with one company. It's just asking for trouble IMHO.

Yes, that does mean I have to think about other areas but I'm happy with that. If nothing else, we get far more favourable rates with our card processing than they pass on!

I am just weighing up the options - as I said earlier, I could write the whole thing from scratch but am just working out the best route for us.

[MrSparks]

I use Opencart.... I started off on EKM Powershop and it was okay to get me going but it was restricted, you can't change or add features until they decide to add them so you're at their mercy. And if they go bust or decide to stop offering the service (think Magento Go!) then you're in a pretty awkward position that could you a lot. With some of the bigger companies there is less risk of this happening, but I guess you don't get much bigger than eBay (who own Magento.....) so it's impossible to say you'd be "safe".

I find Opencart easy to work with, easy to modify and add modules. I'm not a developer so if it's easy for me then it must be even easier for a pro. I don't think that there is anything that Opencart can't do, or be made to do and I've never had a problem with it on shared hosting. (not like I get 10,000 orders a day though) beauty is if I did get 10,000 orders a day you can easily get the whole platform/website moved to adequate hosting.... whilst I sit on my yacht drinking cocktails.

Definitely take a look, have a play and see what you think.. you might find that most/all of the features you want are available as add-ons for a reasonable cost too ...