Small Company/Huge Catalog needs E-commerce Solution

[kevendean]

I work for a very small industrial product distributor (I am the entire I.T./Web Dept.). We are looking for an affordable way to develop an online store front. I have looked at a number of the shopping cart software packages that people have mentioned in these forums, unfortunately, our company seems to be in a little bit different situation than most. Although we are a small company, we have a product offering of over 700,000 different items/parts. All of this information is currently stored in a Visual FoxPro database.

We are looking for an e-commerce application or solution that can handle a product offering as large as ours. We would like for customers to be able to search for items by part number and/or manufacturer. We would also like to have an online catalog approach for customers who do not know the specific item that they need, but know the features, requirements, etc. The difficulty here is that the products that we sell are very technical and have many different features, specifications, and options. I can envision a drill down menu taking as many as a dozen steps to bring the customer to the precise item that they need.

To recap, our major needs are a tool that is customizable and can handle 700,000+ records, as well as a highly complex hierarchical catalog component.

Does anyone have any suggestions of products that might fit our needs?

[speedmachines]

We're in the same boat. Right now we're looking at WA eCommerce Suite 2.1, but we're waiting for some feedback from anyone that has used it. It looks like it's the right program for the job, but we're hoping for some reasurance before we buy it.

Chris

[edited by: lorax at 10:26 pm (utc) on Feb. 28, 2005]

[ogletree]

Nothing will work out of the box for that you will need a custom solution. That is not cheap. Also you need to make sure that you seo the thing.

[sem4u]

Yes you will have to go for a custom solution. While this won't be cheap, once it is set up and working correctly it should start paying dividends.

[kevendean]

so even with some tweaking and add-on modules, etc. there are no canned applications that could be adapted to accomplish what we want?

what insight and suggestions do you all have for developing a custom solution? Any platform or development language issues that I need to consider? Is this something that I could realistically attempt to build on my own, if I polished up my ASP or ColdFusion skills? Or is it complex enough that an outside development company would be necessary? Any broad ballpark figures on cost for such a project?

I realize that these are vague questions with very few specifics supplied, I am just trying to get some initial information and ideas so I can determine what my options are. Thanks.

[BlackRaven]

if you are going to be accepting payments online its best to let the professionals handle it. Not too sure about price but seems like $1500 - $3000.

[minnapple]

We do custom ecom applications, and if someone came to me with the same requirements I would bid it out at $4500 - $12500.

The database programming is about half of the cost, the design and the user interface comprises the other half.

The second half usually has the most variables in terms of time and cost. This part is so grey, if clients came to me with this part completed, the implementation cost would be less.

Good internal preplanning can save 25 to 50% on development costs.

[conradmiller123]

I had exctaly the same problem 3 years ago we wrote our own system. The heiarchy works just like windows. were folders are categories. and files are the leafs or products. Any who we have over 100,000 pages with out breaking a sweat. and the whole site can be regenerated in a few hours. It creates all html pages. Basicly plug in your data header a footer and you would be ready to go. As for a shopping cart use a generic one that allows you to stuff item in the cart from a form like mal's ecommerce or shopsite. We kept it all modular so we can mix and match our cart catalog generator or search engine as we upgrade things. No software package really will fit your business perfectly. And if your looking at the popular one's like candypress. Or ablecommerce your out of luck the code is has to much over head to deal with much more than 50,000 sku. Dont get me wrong thoes could work but I dont think your customers are going to wait the 3 seconds for the database queries to complete.