Forum Moderators: buckworks
Problems we have come across:
Managing of categories and products is a real pain when you get up to any real quantity.
Buried coding makes additions/changes very time consuming.
Poor image management systems - if you have 2000 products how do know if the thumbnail or main image is missing.
Long checkout procedures - most systems try to emulate Amazon. Let's be fair we are not Amazon.
I am hoping to build a CSS based static page system for atleast 20,000 products and was wondering if anyone has a checklist for a project of this type.
Thanks
Ta
wondering if anyone has a checklist for a project of this type.
These are just ideas off the top of my head, not guaranteed to be completely thought through:
1. a robust 'related items' feature for each poduct page
2. A robust 'testimonial' feature for each product page (add product specific testimonials to product pages)
2. a product page pull-down menu for add-ons and subtractions next to the 'add to cart' button;
(add one widgetA +$3.00)
(download only -$3.00)
3. automatic download option in customer account (download link for digital products)
4. The ability for the customer to have a choice between multiple payment systems. (ie: between Paypal, Linkpoint/Authorize.net, purchase order, echeck, snail mail, etc)
5. Maybe a checkbox to designate which items will be featured on the home page. Checking the box would automatically send a thumbnail and short description to the designated home page.
6. Metrics, one thing I would really love in a shopping cart script would be a sales data feature. (Since all the info is right there it would be great to see a graph of sales/returns over time, sales split out into city, state and countries, B2B vs B2C, etc. This would also helpful at tax time.)
7. Discount codes
8. Shipping discounts by amount of items or price
9. The ability for the customer to see the shipping cost and/or discounts before logging in or registering.
I can post more as I think of them if this is the kind of thing you're looking for.
Personally, I think the time would be better spent doing some serious assessment of all the carts out there, buying the top 3 or 4 of them (not too bad as the vast majority of carts are less than $1,000) and doing an in depth assessment of those. Shouldn't take more than 2 weeks.
Given that producing a cart from scratch would be a major piece of work now, and an ongoing burden in the future (as opposed to having the vendor continuously upgrade it), I would think that this would give a better product for less money.
There may be larger issues at play here - competitive differentiation, billable time, or whatever, but from a quality of product issue this would be the best IMHO.
Markbaa,
for me the development time would be better spent on building my own cart, which I think is not as hard considering I will be using secure forms provided by a third parties.
Main concerns that I have with pulling apart other cart systems is that you can get lazy in your development.
I have tried many systems in my time and they all seem to work fine if your store is not large. As soon as you get to thousands of products the whole thing becomes unmanageable. I know that from a programmers point of view it is boring adding 2000 products just to develop a store system, but I think this is essential sometimes.
Build the store to manage a couple of thousand products backwards and you are likely to have a better system.
I think that a robust system of import and export of products is important also cross selling, buy this get that free, reduce all products within a cat by a percentage, robust method of handling product attributes and a system of having an unlimited amount of information pages.
Apart from Osc and its kids what do you think are the top ecommerce systems available for large quantities of products?
