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Small Businesses and the Outsourcing of e-Commerce?

Posted by Cliff on from the effective-cost-cutting-moves? dept.

Zzzt asks: "I work at a very small advertising agency & production company, doing various electronic media projects, including small websites. In anticipation of our clients going elsewhere, my boss decided we should offer development services for commerce websites, complete with credit card transactions and the like. For those out there who have created these sites, is it worth it for a small company to take on such a project, considering maintanance, liability, and other issues that will come up? Or should we just outsource the whole thing? For a medium to low-end HTML programmer, are there pre-canned packages that will most of the work for me?"

1 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. Outsource billing only by nandix · · Score: 3, Informative

    my advise would be to outsource the billing process only. it wouldn't be profitable for your company to set up
    a billing gateway, so go for one of the many alternatives out there (authorize.net, fraudless.com, trustcommerce.com, et al).
    as for the rest of the e-commerce development (shopping cart, tracking requests, etc), i've used osCommerce (oscommerce.com) with sucess. AFAIK, it's the most complete open source e-commerce suite out there, very well written (it's php code), and easy to extend (you can write your
    specific modules for billing, shipping, etc).

    has both a public part (called the 'catalog') and an admin interface for the
    merchant (this one allows tracking of users, orders, products, etc).

    check out the oscdox.com site for documentation
    on installing and customizing the package

    (note: i'm not related to them in any way, i'm just a satisfied programmer:)

    happy hacking