Business website questions

[drivin_me_nuts]

Morning all,

I am after some advice re. building a website..

Is it better to buy an off the shelf product like erol (or something similar) to provide my internet shop or is it more effecient/cost effective/maintenance viable to go down the bespoke route.

My catalogue of products is changing all the time - most are one-offs and I add probably 5-10 new products a week.

My initial thoughts are to use something like Adobe Golive2 to build the pretty bits and then where appropriate to link to an off the shelf e-shop product.

Does this make sense or are there better and in the mid/long term more cost effective ways of doing this?

Cheers

[davidd]

It depends how much of a coder you are, however you could do a lot worse than to take a look at oscommerce.

A lot of it depends on the featureset you want, will it handle returns, will there be a user account history, configuration tools, cross and up selling, postage options, I could go on

OS commerce has a lot of this covered....

First things first, write a requirements spec, post the basisc on here and I'm sure you'll get some good suggestions.

D

[slapmatt]

I'd agree with OSCommerce. It's got all the basic functionality you need, you can modify it if you really want to and there are plenty of templates around to make your site look half decent.

It makes me laugh when people talk about "bespoke" e-commerce sites. I've worked for one of the UK largest high street retailers and even their sites wasn't bespoke, it was based on an off the shelf (albeit heavy duty) e-commerce package, with front and back end modifications to fit their specification.