Need Ecommerce

before Xmas!

[Andrew Thomas]

Can anyone recommend a package to set up an ecommerce site. I need a quick solution (needs to be setup by christmas), fairly cheap to buy (£200 - £300) and connect to an Accounting package eg SAGE, would also be nice to be able to create multiple stores for future use.

thanks for any advice

[Andrew Thomas]

forgot to mention, I use ASP and Windows 2000 server if that helps!

[Shakil]

Andrew,

I was under the impression that SAGE only integrated with their "Web Trader" program?

Shak

[Andrew Thomas]

To be honest, SAGE was an example, the brief my boss has given is that he wants to create a site on the quick, and the goods being sold are very small profit margins, so he does not want to spend a lot of money and would want the invoices etc to go into an A/c program to keep staff work time to a minimum.

Andy

[Shakil]

Andy,

I was not trying to be clever :)

just that we had a similar situation a few weeks ago, and after long discussions with Sage, we gathered they wanted us to use their Web Trader software package (no thnaks)

Good luck with the hunting

Shak

[aspdaddy]

Shak,

Sage also intergrates with SalesLogix.net

[TallTroll]

>> Sage also intergrates with SalesLogix.net

Hmmm, yes, but that is a CRM package, not an ecomm package

Andrew_Thomas, I'm sorry to break your heart, but there is no pacakge anywhere in the world that meets those requirements (believe me, I've looked hard). There are several ecomm packages that integrate to Sage, and/or other accounts packages, and the absolute cheapest I know of is a minimum of £500 for the B2C software, £750 for B2B.

The problem in general terms is push/pulling information. All accounts software stores the relevant information in tables in a database, but all of them store different information, and some of them require specialised (ie proprietary) data links to push order info back into the accounts. This is at least partly for the protection of your accounts data integrity, because if it just accepted any old transactions you threw at it, you would irretrievably kill your accounts database inside a month, tops.

Taking the Sage example, their ecomm series has data pull (accounts -> web side) built in at all 3 levels of the ecommerce software, but only has a push link in the top level WebTrader Pro package (which is £1500 pa, so you'd hope it did). There are other packages available that do it, or you can do it your self if you sign up as a Sage Develeoper, because then you get access to the Sage Development Object code which controls data flow into a Sage a/c system.

We've done a considerable amount of integration with Sage, and we always find that we end up having to write an intermediate database, pulling what info there is out of Sage, supplementing it in the database, and then using that for the ecomm site data source, then running the management out of the intermediate database

>> so he does not want to spend a lot of money and would want the invoices etc to go into an A/c program to keep staff work time to a minimum.

I'm afraid your boss is going to be sorely dissapointed. For that level of website/backend integration, he is going to be looking at a bill for at least £2500, IMO (anything lower than that would make my alarm bells go off. What you've proposed is NOT a trivial task).

Most of the GOOD packages that do accounts integration (properly, that is) are in the £5k - £20k bracket, plus customisation