Forum Moderators: buckworks
I'm brand new here, so please forgive me if this was covered somewhere beyond the point that I searched before posting! I'm designing a site for a person who sells pieces of fabric. She has limited quantities of these pieces. I need a shopping cart program that will allow inventory control so a buyer can't order more than she has. It also needs to be able to reduce the number it has by however many were just ordered, so that the next person along can't order too many, if you see what I mean.
She wants to use only PayPal for payment processing, so hopefully that will make it easier. PayPal's cart does not, as you likely already know, support inventory control of any sort.
I also don't want a full storefront program, unless it's completely customizable to match the rest of the site. PayPal's cart would have worked out well because it's seems to be mostly a code generator, basically.
If it matters, she's hosted by LunarPages.
Can anyone direct me to what might work here? Thanks so much!
It requires PHP safe mode off - so many web hosting services are not compatible. You can look for "x-cart hosting" in Google.
they all have the features you required, I will further customize it to meet your needs
Leaf Web Team
Leafguy, this is lethal for search engines, forget it around SEO people.
[leafshoppingcart.viperhosting.net...]
If the person only sells pieces of fabric (I assume it's mill ends), it sounds to me like it won't be a big, big money site. She'll have to keep changing pages if she uses static pages, so one way would be to have some static site pages for search engine purposes with only some sample display of fabric, and the rest in the cart without worrying about indexing.
It depends on how much she wants to spend. I've heard osCommerce can be made search engine friendly and that comes free with a lot of reasonable hosting (actually, with dirt cheap hosting). Then, look down at the bottom of the page here - westhost includes MIVA with their hosting which is now getting crawled - though I'd still recommend some static pages for more optimization control.
Miva does keep inventory, if not as is then with an add-on module and all of those are very cheap.
In addition, they now have product specific meta tags as an add-on module, so that your whole site doesn't have a generic set of meta tags. Meta tags aren't as important as they once were, but every little bit helps!
I'm not saying X-cart is the best system out there, but I haven't been able to find a better one for the money. And if $185 is expensive, I must be in the wrong business! I've seen carts that run in the thousands of dollars. Sure OS Commerce is free, but if you don't understand PHP, you are not going to find that it is an easy experience.
Just my thoughts on the matter.
osCommerce has 'user-friendlly URLs option in admin - it kills the SID numbers when it detects any SE from a list.
OsCommerce may be regarded as overkill for a small site, but I use it here for just three products:
[books.bilton.ch...]
However, It took me the best part of year to get to grips with oscommerce - perhaps paypal buttons is what the original poster is after?
My client decided she wants to go with King Cart (does a whole bunch of stuff she wants including inventory control, international shipping calculations, etc, as well as lets me completely customize the look of each page). We're going to have the fabric categories (which'll have sample pictures) on static, non-cart pages, and the actual items for sale on cart pages. I think we'll be okay with the search engines that way?
Thank you all so much for the help -- I really appreciate it!
