Help/Advice required for developing E-commerce Website

puthsardarade

Hi,

I have some experience of design basic static websites, using html and css and I have been asked by someone to develop an ecommerce website. The ecommerce website would be for the selling of IT products, along the lines of https://www.dabs.com

As it would entail a shopping cart etc I am a little unsure on how to get started. I was going to produce some design mock-ups in Photoshop. An easier option would be to use some e-commerce web designing software.

Can anyone recommend any websites/software to do the above? Open source would be ideal!
Also any indication of how much I could charge for this? 

Thanks in advance,
G

Browntoa

this is free and widley used

http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/oscommerce

strike13

if you need help, just pm me

puthsardarade

Just PM'd you strike13.

Thanks for the suggestion about: http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/oscommerce

Anymore?

Cheers,
G

Browntoa

this is free as well

http://www.zen-cart.com/

Browntoa

forgot to add, you may want to charge by the hour , the basic site set up is easy enough but the loading of the stock is tedious, one item at a time. If they are going to do this then work out how long it takes by setting up a test site first

puthsardarade

Hi,

Thanks for all your advice. I came across an interesting article about the various options:
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/essentials/shopping_carts/article.php/3668061

I have narrowed it down to just 3 now:

http://www.comersus.com
which uses asp with VB script

http://www.zen-cart.com/ and http://www.oscommerce.com/solutions/oscommerce


It would be nice to hear anyone who has used the above and which one they would recommend.

Cheers,
G

Moneymaker

Beware! I don't know the other two but the basic Oscommerce package fails to display the invoice total before asking the customer to enter his details. For this reason I (and probably others) don't place orders on Oscommerce sites. There is a "patch" for Oscommerce that fixes this.

puthsardarade

Thanks for your responses. It was mentioned to me that: Zen Cart is an adapted version of oscommerce is slightly more superior, can someone who has used both confirm this?

As for charging, what I was going to do was setup the intial site with a few dummy items, change the look and feel of it a little and then basically just provide them this. Any idea on what I could charge for something like this, as I am quite new to this all.

There are additional services that they might want afterwards such as - copywriting, logos/images, seo, email setup etc, but again unsure what to charge for these? Luckly they will be updating all their products themselves! :-)

Thanks,
G

Flexible_Friend

Be aware that osCommerce doesn't work with PHP version 5.

Another good piece of e-commerce software (not free) is Actinic.

http://www.actinic.co.uk/index.shtml