E-Commerce Website

[Godders]

Hi All,

A collegue and I are building a website for the company we work for. Our boss now wants to sell certain products online and he wants us to incorporate that into the site. We are both mainly print designers but are pretty decent with html, css and flash. Just don't know where to start with this really. Any advice, tutorials would be very much appreciated!

Thanks

Godders

[nyc_skater]

Check out the tutorials on Webmonkey's page, I found them really helpful when I delved into the world of e-commerce

http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/e-business/building/

[Glovebox]

Hi Godders,

I finished building a shop for my Doodleblog (http://www.doodleblog.co.uk/) site a couple of weeks ago. I used ViArt Shop (http://www.codetosell.com/) which certainly isn't perfect (the CMS is definitely not intuitive) but it is pretty flexible with little or no PHP editing and they offer a free version (with database restrictions).

If you have a look at the Doodleblog Souvenir Shop (http://shop.doodleblog.co.uk/) it'll give you an idea of what you can do with the script, although there are a number of features that I haven't used in my design.

Cheers,
Simon

[Jam]

First things first - check that your hosting company will support an ecommerce site and if they do - what products you can or should use.
No point buying something thats not going to work.
Most hosting companies should offer a plug and play system.
Other wise Actinic offer a really professional product - they produce a smaller version that isn't listed on their site and is limited to a small number of products.

[Jam]

You should also look into the types of products your offering and the cost of dispatching these around the world

[Jam]

How are you going to take the orders?
How are you going to process the money side of things (online/offline)?
Online - you'll need to speak to your bank and set up a Merchant account.
Online transactions are either charged as a percentage of the order or a fixed fee.
Offline you can run the orders through your own store - only cost is someones time.
Whos going to be running the site?
Whos going to update/populate the store?
Whos going to keep stock of the stock?
Take a step back and look at the whole process of selling these items online...