In a Crunch

Developer Backed Out of Project

[katana_one]

So my company lands a major contract with a multi-billion dollar multi-national company. We have (semi)exclusive rights to provide widgets to this client. Management green-lights an online store to handle the ordering and shipment tracking, etc. Management hires a third party contractor (against my recommendation) to build the site to our specifications (which are actually our client's specifications).

Three months behind schedule now and the contractor has backed out.

Now we've got a website that's only partially completed and, of course, I'm probably going to have to try and fix it. I have never used ColdFusion or built a shopping cart.

Who can recommend a solid, easy-to-install, easy-to-use shopping cart that is also easy to customize?

[bcolflesh]

osCommerce:
http://www.oscommerce.com/

[edited by: lorax at 10:29 pm (utc) on Mar. 9, 2005]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[Reflect]

If OSC seems to steep to learn then try ZEN Cart. It is based on OSC, just modified for you to purchse.

Take care,

Brian

[incrediBILL]

OsCommerce and easy to customize shouldn't be on the same page, free doesnt make it easy

What you choose should be a long term solution if you really want to keep this customer.

Considering it's a large company, do they need full inventory and order entry integration?

My experience with larger customers has been that they want ecommerce to tie into their existing systems for real-time or batch updating at a minimum, so I would choose something with these integration options.

Lots of options to choose from, but I would shy away from mickey mouse solutions for a big fish.

[katana_one]

Originally, I was looking at Miva Merchant because it seemed to offer the flexibility of functionality we needed, but the contractor said that a custom cart built with ColdFusion was a more robust and secure solution.

We actually don't need to process credit cards since all product will be billed out to a work order, so security might not be that big a deal. Most of the site will work exactly like a standard shopping cart, the only real "custom" needs can be handled by adding some form fields to the ship to/bill to information.

I would like to set it up so the user has to create an account before viewing content because we are selling the widgets at below retail and they are not for sale to the public.

I know HTML and CSS but ecommerce is something I am very new to, so I don't want to get in over my head.

Thanks for the replies, by the way.

[incrediBILL]

ColdFusion was a more robust and secure solution

I just love the claims of the snake oil salesman.

How much more secure do you need to be than encrypted data transmitted over SSL stored in an inaccessible location? And ColdFusion seems to tank under extremely heavy loads, so I'm not sure about the robustness he was talking about.

Miva Merchant out of the box would handle your site up to a point. It's built on xBase database technology which will work fine up to about 50,000 records (products, orders, etc. per database) before real serious performance degredation. If you don't have that many products and keep the order database purged down to the last couple of months worth it's probably just fine. There are Miva plug-ins available that allow you to switch to MySQL which should solve the performance problem. Unfortunately, Miva is a proprietary language but it has a lot of developers.

I'd recommend something in PHP or ASP just because it's more mainstream and will probably have the longest life of 3rd party developer support.

[katana_one]

I just love the claims of the snake oil salesman.

Indeed. I had serious doubts about this guy's claims, based on previous work of his that I had seen. Unfortunately, he is a friend of the boss so my concerns were ignored.

We're currently looking at as many options as we can find. I like Miva, but the advice on using PHP is also pretty sound in my opinion.

[Corey Bryant]

You might contact Josh over at sitetutor - they have an ASP cart that is very customizable

-Corey

[bunltd]

Take a look at X-Cart.

FWIW, I don't care for Miva much anymore, too proprietary, requires purchasing too many plugins ($$) to get to a good level of functionality and I've seen too many cases where it's just slow.

LisaB

[Jack_Hughes]

jshop may be a good choice. we've got it running on a couple of shops & it works fine. it is implemented in php. you can customize to your hearts content.

[katana_one]

Thanks again for all the suggestions. We will definately take a look at all of them.

[henry0]

Keep in mind than Zend and Oscomm are not yet PHP5 ready
The only out of the box solution (serious one) that I know of is X-cart gold which is PHP5 ready

But, I do not get it; why are you going that route? If I consider your work environment I can feel that spending some $ should not be a problem
I would hire a serious prg person let him hire one or two more coders and dev a solution to your specs

regards

[katana_one]

Update!

We have a new developer on board, and we're still stuck on using a ColdFusion cart.

New parameters have been revealed that I was not originally aware of - the cart has to support split shipping and support for this has been spotty at best with the ColdFusion carts we have looked at so far.

Anybody know a good cart that will support split shipping on an order, and is still user-friendly?

[Raymond]

If it is a project for a multi-billion dollar company, I seriously doubt you should even consider third party solution such as xcart or OSC. Nothing against these software, but, it just looks bad presenting this "solution" to companies like Walmart, don't you think?

We wrote our own backend system which takes care of everything from shopping cart/shipping/accounting/SEO friendly. We are benefiting alot from this perfect-fit customized solution. And It really didn't cost THAT much.

[EstoreSeeker]

have a look at b2bparadise. it might be helpful for your purpose as well as your client's specifications.