eCommerce Project

[eluser]Jon L[/eluser]
Magento Commerce has alot of promise, but has a few negatives:
1. It's based on Zend Framework
2. It's slow
3. The SEF implementation allows multiple urls to the same destination = duplicate content
4. In my opinion, it seems difficult to extend, but that's likely due to my own unfamiliarity with Zend Framework and it's MVC implementation

OSCommerce and Zen Cart are fine alternatives, but if someone has a few bucks to invest, I never recommend those solutions.

The best solution I've found, is X-Cart. Yes, it's commercial, but it's fully visible-source, and inexpensive compared to other commercial solutions (only $230 last I checked). It's procedural code, but is fast, and customizing is straightforward. The 3rd party community is very active, as is the normal user community, despite being a closed community (usually the kiss of death for a product, but works great in this case due to the extended user base). My own website operates on X-Cart, and I'm happy with the result.

Cheers

[eluser]Flemming[/eluser]
Unless you really need all the (in my opinion bloated) functions of an off-the-shelf-one-size-fits-all ecommerce solution - AND you're familiar with CI already ... then why not go ahead and write your own ecommerce system with CI?

Think of what really constitutes an ecommerce site ...

* A list of products (usually organised into categories)
* A cart/basket so the visitor can add and remove items from it
* A shipping calculator
* A checkout
* An order history/process

Unless I've missed something that's all you need for a basic ecommerce system. Anything else will be 'add-ons' to enhance the system.

The beauty of making your own is that you will know exactly how to customise it when the client (as they inevitably do) asks for tweaks!

Hope that helps ?

[eluser]Rick Jolly[/eluser]
[quote author="flemming" date="1222893857"]
Unless I've missed something...
[/quote]
Taxes.

[eluser]ray73864[/eluser]
I am close to finishing my own ecommerce site, none of the existing ecommerce systems were any good especially with how the tax system works in Australia.

i ended up having to put a select list with the shopping cart allowing a person to say whether they are 'Within Australia' or 'International' since the GST is only valid for Australians when purchasing from an Australian store.

Needless to say, what i have discovered is that all you need for an ecommerce site is exactly what was said above, plus an admin side so that people can add categories and products. The one i have been doing also has a CSV file importer (using MySQL's LOAD DATA INFILE) so that the client can update the products in one hit ensuring that the store system and the online system are up to date.

[eluser]Rick Jolly[/eluser]
ray73864 - how do you calculate shipping, both domestic and international? Sophisticated carts will use shipping company web services. I once used LOAD DATA INFILE for client uploading csv files but regretted it later since validation isn't an option.

[eluser]Jay Turley[/eluser]
I just finished rolling my own ecommerce site too. It's not too difficult.

If you are doing ecommerce for a store which only has a few items, it might even be worth it to use something like paypal's carts, where each item is added as a separate chunk of code on the page, and paypal handles all the cart and payments for you. Not very professional or seamless, but it will work.

The site I just built has CSV import, but I rolled my own here. I just read each line in, validate the contents, and then insert it into the database. In addition, when logged in as admin, every item inthe store displays a bunch of editing options to allow changing of price, description, thumbnail, etc.

I built a business rules engine (essentially) in the Cart controller for calculating shipping. In this case, every store category had different shipping rules and it was a huge pain.

The next time I do an ecommerce site, I may try magento, but then again, I now have a framework to build on, clunky as it may be.

[eluser]ray73864[/eluser]
i don't require the validation of the csv import (the information is coming from an Access Database that the client built for his store, and since i know him very well and work with him with his other business (i have a proper job too), he and I can work together on making sure the CSV file is already validated), however each week i would be importing a good 5000 records and i have to do several things, i have to check to see if the item exists in the DB and if it does update it otherwise add it, with the CSV importer that i was using, it choked at 7000 of 24000 records to import and even when i managed to stick a usleep() in there it was still going to take an hour or so to import all the records.

as for the shipping, calculating shipping in Australia is not easy, Australia Post (which is what the majority of parcels get delivered through) has a whole stack of rules, such as weight and then delivery location based on postcode where you then have to work out the difference, plus the only service they have for automatically calculating shipping has a whole lot of rules that go with it in order to use it.

same with a lot of the other courier type services, we Australian's haven't jumped onto the SOAP or webservices bandwagon as much as the USA so it is quite difficult to find a courier (that deals with the area the business is in) which also offers the ability to calculate all that stuff via web services.

[eluser]TheLoops[/eluser]
I haven't used it myself, but I once found PrestaShop quite appealing.
http://www.prestashop.com/

Didn't know Magento was based on ZendFM :gulp: *bummer* >

[eluser]yelirekim[/eluser]
I'm developing an ecommerce store right now with CodeIgniter and I think it's really not a bad choice, the really important thing about building stuff on CI is that it frees you of two huge hurdles you run into with most other e-commerce frameworks:

1. Lack of flexibility.
2. Learning curve for the framework.

Once I finish up this e-commerce site I'm actually planning on releasing a good portion of the stuff I create as open source, because I think that e-commerce frameworks should be a whole lot more like CI. I've worked with oscommerce, zencart, squirrelcart and magento, but every single one of them makes way too many assumptions about what you want to do with your ecommerce store. Between SEO, content management and extras (custom pages suited to your site) it takes more time to reconfigure them to work the way you want, than it does to start from CI and build your way up.

Hopefully in the next month or so I'll have an e-commerce framework for CI that I can share with you guys.

[eluser]TheLoops[/eluser]
yelirekim, looking forward to it!

What's the planned scope of operation, btw?
Will it be modular?