Suggestion on setting up Client's Product Catalog

shopping cart or other solution?

[Solta]

I'm meeting a new potential client in a few days and I need some advice on how to meet some of his requirements in the most cost-effective way.

He has a website for his business which sells high end computer products. He currently has product pages but all items are listed as "call for price". He would like to keep it like that for now and at some point in the future he would consider a shopping cart feature.

His requirements are:
1. wants the look and feel redesigned (no biggie)
2. needs to list around 4000 products
3. wants product urls to be search engine friendly
4. would like an admin tool so that he can update/add product info

My questions are:
1. Would it be wise to set up using a shopping cart package even though no purchases would be made online for a while, or would some content management solution be more ideal for this kind of set up?

2. Also, I'm not sure what the site's traffic is but would a dedicated server be more ideal for that many products?

Any ideas or recommendations?

We haven't discussed the platform yet, but i would prefer PHP-MySQl as i am more familiar with that than ASP or JSP. However, if an ASP/JSP solution is more ideal, i'm all ears, or eyes.

Much appreciated.

[bzprod]

Hello Solta,

I would definately go with a shopping cart system to start with. There are many many choices out there that will accomodate what you are looking for. It doesn't sound like your client needs tons of customzing, so I really wouldn't think starting from the ground up would be especially beneficial.

The call for price feature is standard on many shopping cart systems out there. Then, when he is ready, he can easily add a gateway and take orders online.

Also, with 4,000 products, I would definately shoot for a system that has great support for importing and exporting product databases.

There are a few nice open source PHP solutions for you to choose from as well as paid carts...both managed and unmanaged. Have fun!

[Solta]

thanks bzprod.

Another question. For SEO purposes, is it best to find a cart package that generates static html pages?

And with 4000+ product pages , is that most practical way to go?

[danieljean]

Unless he has a LOT of traffic, there's probably no need for a dedicated server. You can always start him on a small account, and if there is too much traffic, upgrade it.

With 4000+ pages, I would definitely keep things dynamic, only caching if need be. Maintenance will be very annoying if you don't, and you can still manage to have search-engine friendly URLs without static files.

I really dislike MySQL for all of its gotchas, and the fact it's not standards compliant- any custom work on it will often be useless on Postgres, Oracle, MS-SQL. However if you can find a PHP-MySQL that doesn't tie you to either technology (so you can "graduate" to a J2EE-Postgres solution in the future without hurdles), then definitely keep things simple.

[Solta]

I saw on a few ecommerce sites where the urls looked like www.website.com/category/subcat/product . No? or variables. Can this be achieved through a dynamic site, or are these actual static pages?

I found a couple of shopping carts where they give you the option of generating static pages from a database-driven site. Is this a good way to go, given that the merchant won't make frequent changes to product pages?

[danieljean]

Sending a parameter to a static page has no effect.

You could however cache elements of the page to not have to make the database call every time. Some packages already handle that.

If at all possible, avoid generating all the static pages at once. Unless you can't handle the traffic, I wouldn't even bother caching.