A few of my buddies are getting together and we're creating a site to sell t-shirts. We're simplifying things by making it a shirt-of-the-week type of thing where we post a shirt in limited quantity each week and pull it off when it sells out. This way we only need to worry about one type of inventory (well, we'll need to have different sizes, as well). We're also discussing a limit to the number of shirts you can buy per order to make things a bit easier yet. It's entirely possible everything I'm asking is addressed somewhere, but I haven't seen it, so if you could point me in the right direction that would be great. I'm a software developer with some PHP experience and plenty of database experience.
Sound like shirt.woot.com? Probably. We're trying to differentiate ourselves, but the more we brainstorm, the more similar our idea gets. Shipping is a flat fee, shirts will always cost the same and probably be available in 3 or 4 sizes. The point is to make the site have more attitude, though, with a bit of background on each shirt and some additional commentary. That's why our initial thought is to use blogging software. We want users to interact, so we're basically picturing posting a new shirt as a new blog entry and people can discuss in the comments. It'll also be profile-driven, with a shirt being added to a person's profile when they buy it.
The current idea is to use WordPress as the site's base and add our simple store pieces to that, and use Paypal checkout to handle orders. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm not sure this is the best idea, and I don't know what would be.
The biggest issue we're worried about right now is inventory. In the limited reading I've done so far, Paypal doesn't track inventory at all, we just pass the cost of the order and they accept the payment, and inventory needs to be tracked on our end. Not good if there is one shirt left and Bob submits his order while Sally is still filling out her details. Also not good if Bob decides doesn't complete his order while the site is telling Sally the last shirt is already sold. How do I get around this? The additional features ecommerce packages have (I haven't really looked...) will surely be useful once we are dealing with enough orders to genuinely worry about accounting.
As it is, we're flying by the seat of our pants. I want to make sure we have all the tools we'll need in place before we go live because we're bound to experience enough growing pains (if we're at all successful) without worrying about setting up additional pieces. Thanks in advance for your input!
