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!"

Comments

need more information

[joe094287523459087]

it totally depends on your environment.

are you limited to certain services by your ISP or do you have access to install and run anything?

is it windows or linux?

will the catalog change often or rarely?

do the owners need to be able to make changes themselves or will they always hire someone to make changes?

do you want it 99% secure or 99.99% secure?

how much traffic do you get, from modem users or broadband users?

do you want something turn-key or would be be comfortable doing the integration yourself between the separate packages for the catalog, the shopping cart, and the payment system?

there is no one-size-fits-all answer for all these different permutations - post more info :)

Credit Card Numbers

[ddeyoung]

Call me paranoid... When it's just me, I don't want to be responsible for credit card numbers. If I have to develop, deploy, and secure the whole mess at every level (software, system, network)... Forget it!!! Outsource the credit card part at least for God's sake!!! The store front resides on your server, connects to your db server, resides behind your firewall, and somebody else takes liability where the money is concerned. my 2 cents.

Storephront

[dragonfly_blue]

I noticed an open source project that has the potential to be just what you need, called StorePhront. I am not sure how stable or versatile it is as I have not yet tried it, but their demo is impressive. Check it out here.

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.

Are you sure of what you want?

[KILNA]

I understand that being a system admin for a mom and pop store can be fun, you get to be the hero, you get to put your mark on the world. But you're also costing mom and pop a lot more to have someone on staff to patch the system if problems crop up. You're also tying yourself to all the responsibility, becoming a single point of failure for their online business. Nobody ever likes being the single point of failure for anything. Are you sure you really want to own the software and the hardware?

There are a lot of e-commerce services out there... you may not 'own' the hardware or software for them, but any of them worth their salt will allow you to export all of the crucial information into file formats that can be read into another piece of software. Yahoo Stores takes this model, and so does my employer Zoovy. Better still, you have a company that you can hold accountable in case something goes pear-shaped. They consolidate the resources of administering the systems, patching the e-commerce software, and making security upgrades, saving mom and pop money. For the same reason that managed hosting is useful, so is going for an e-commerce service that doesn't require you to maintain everything. Who actually enjoys dealing with SSL certificates, DNS hiccups, troubleshooting credit card gateways, backing up databases. A service can take away these not-so-fun parts all while giving higher availability, leaving you to play around with HTML templates and finding better ways to make the store make money. And making money is what you're there to help mom and pop do, right?

Re:Are you sure of what you want?

[eddy the lip]

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!