Forum Moderators: buckworks
We have been looking at Websphere and OS Commerce but obviously there are many others with a varying degree of difficulty to set up and develop. We would be eager to hear from anyone who has had some experience and would be willing to share what they think with us. What were the key features that convinced you to choose that software? If you had particular success using a third party developer to help implement the software, we would be eager to hear who you would recommend.
We are currently using Softcart with a flat file database of 6,500 products and plan to have as many as 20,000 in the future. We are running on Windows 2000 server with IIS. We are leasing the server through a tier one service provider.
The question is wrong. The proper question would be: "what is the best ecommerce platform for us?"
Who you are?
Is that WebSphere you're talking about that monstrous product from IBM?
If so -- then definitely, it can be used to platform everything. But I wouldn't use it unless you are a huge corporation (something like bank) with mainframes and own servers on place. You'll need crowds of administrators, programmers and engineers to use it. Apart from it, it is about $50,000. You can program it with Java, Cobol, C/C++... Sophisticated, mature, damn powerful and hell complicated.
If you currently store your products in a flat file on a leased server, I wouldn't recommendet it to you.
I personally prefer OSCommerce -- you'll need one-three PHP programmers and a web designer to tune it, and a couple of contant-managers to fill it up. It is simple, pretty fast and I think (made some polls) will survive with millions of products in tables.
OSCommerce is community-built -- I prefer such products because their are clear, simple and mostly less-buggy.
We are also in search of a platform to build an ecom site, but only a few hundred. We are considering .net (aspx), and search engine friendliness is also very important to us.
Anyone feedback on this?
Thanks in advance :-)
Or you can develop your own solution using WebSphere, .Net or something else based on your existing familiarity with these platforms. That means that you'll probably get 100% what you are looking for.
One possible direction for further step is to convert E-Comerce to E-Busines...
This probably means that you should integrate your existing inventory control, logistics, bookkeeping, store management, supply chain management, Web-Shop etc. in one consistent system.
