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Storefront-in-a-Box
like-it-or-not asks: "I'm the network admin for a Mom & Pop chain of warehouses and stores. The owners finally want to take the leap to the 'online market' and have asked me to build them a storefront (catalog and shopping cart, etc.). I haven't done any Web building in several years so I haven't kept up with the many changes in the field. Rather than construct something 'from scratch', I'm wanting to just buy (and then customize) a 'store in a box' (pre-made HTML+CGI+? templates). I've looked around some and wonder what recommendations this community might offer.
I have only one requirement: I want to 'own' the software and hardware, not simply use it as a part of renting some space from a provider). Thanks!"
If it seems to be the type of thing that will work for you, I'm sure the authors would accept and appreciate contributions for further development.
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I used to run several large ecommerce sites and for the majority of small to medium shops I would recommend Yahoo Stores over many self-hosting approaches. Most small shops fit nicely into the catalog based approach that Yahoo uses. If nothing else, the economics of paying a cut to a hosting services outway the cost of building and hosting it yourself.
If you still want to do it yourself, the Intershop product used to be fairly good. You may need to hook up your inventory system in any case. There are several open source projects, but I don't know enought to comment on them.
If you were to develop it yourself then yes you would save some money and spend a lot of time developing it. Other wise just outsource it! It costs you more but will be designed exactly to your needs.
I have not come accross any perfect out of the box solution for what you are asking. If you want to do it yourself i would strongly suggest after you decide on the platform being windows or unix look into getting someone to getting someone like verisign (more customers that way) for your credit card processing.
Then decide on the database for all your inventory. If it is already in sql or oracle or whatever you might be able to go with that and not pay a fortune but mostly spend time to design your own databae for all the inventory. Not to mention the ability to have a send to shipping solution (with other words no double checking) in inventory automatic deduction based on the online orders.
Don't forget if you spend more money now you most likely will save a lot more for the future! Look at the whole system not just the webstore front part.
The other important thing is of course make sure it gets advertised right otherwise you don't benefit.
Self-hosting probably wouldn't be what I'd recommend either (having credit card numbers on my server makes me nervous, but then I'm not qualified to admin an e-commerce server). But, whatever you do, for your sanity, don't go near Yahoo! Stores. I've developed a couple, and I've been admining a quite busy one for nearly a year now and it's utter hell. If you don't care what the site looks like, you can use one of their pre-built catalog template thingies and probably be ok, but if you want to do anything remotely customized, you'll be delving into RTML. RTML is it's own little hell - the lispish syntax is kinda nice, but doing server side programming by pointing and clicking through forms (no, you can't just type the code in) is insanely time consuming, and hard on the mouse wrist.
An extra joy when I first worked on it was that RTML wasn't actually documented anywhere, if by documentation you mean any kind of explanation or example of how to use a particular construct. I understand there's a book available now, but I can't vouch for it as I haven't read it.
Further, the fact that little bits of HTML and javascript and what have you end up scattered across various forms will make hunting for that particular menu graphic that you need to change a real treat. You'll start out with the best of intentions - keeping all your pieces nicely organized and in their proper locations. But the tools are simply not designed for ease of administration and the onset of entropy will be swift.
Finally, while you can do things like download your catalog from the server, you can't actually get at any other part of the site. There's no template you can store locally and just upload for handy updates. And when you finally get tired of spending two or three times as long doing simple tasks and decide to move, you'll find that you need to build the site from scratch again, because it won't run anywhere else. You can't just grab your site and upload it to another server. You're trapped.
I'll stop ranting now - I just can't begin to tell you how much time I've wasted dealing with Yahoo! Stores. My time has meant client's money, and the only one winning is Yahoo!
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