madeinhawaii - 9:08 pm on Aug 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

Building a website is very time consuming. Building an ecommerce site, even more so. BUT, a website is a great complement to one's real world sales efforts. My wife is a landscape and nature photographer. As such, it is impossible for her to carry or display all of her prints and all of the available sizes she offers with her at any given time or place. With the exception of, that is, doing it online.

Often we will direct potential customers to our website and have them order from the website or in person after they have made their decision. Sometimes, we will set up a special page for them just to highlight specific offerings. This concept is ideal for the custom jewelry market. We ocassionally email previous customers with new offerings when we think it is something they would be especially interested in.

Since she is designing one-of-a-kind pieces. A good place to start would be ZEN-CART, an open-source php ecommerce engine on sourceforge that would allow her customers to purchase her products via paypal or some other merchant account service.

Best regards,
Dennis