Building e-commerce websites

how do all of you do it?

[Andrew Thomas]

Just out of interest, all of you who develop e-commerce sites, do you purchse an ecommerce package, or write your own, or buy a pre-written script?

Im looking into setting up ecommerce sites and wondered what the rest of you do, and what you would recommend

thanks

[BlobFisk]

That really depends on exactly what functionality is needed on the site, and how many products (or, how large the site is going to be).

While there are many free scripts out there and even more off the shelf products that can be purchaced, it all depends on what you are looking to do.

Generally, developing an app like this from the ground up allows you to build it to the clients exact needs and specifications. Having said this, many of the off-the-shelf products and free scripts are very versatile and powerful, although many, AFAIK, only allow for a limited amount of products.

It's horses for courses really - the answer to your questions depends very much on what you and/or your client want. I prefer to build from scratch (using ASP and either a SQL or MDB database).

[Andrew Thomas]

Thanks BlobFisk, if i wanted to develop the ecommerce site myself - where is the best place to start, im familiar with ASP and database connections, but i have know knowlege of how to link to payment solutions etc....

Are there any resources, books you could suggest thanks

Andy

[BlobFisk]

I would imagine that that depends on where in the world you are, Andrew! I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in Ireland you are quite limited, there are (if I remember correctly) only two financial institutions that facilitate online payments here.

The best thing to do may be to contact a couple of financial intitutions and see what they have to offer. I'm sure that some other UK based members will be along to offer adice on this one. Different credit card verification and processing services may have different ways of doing things. From your server, you would send the credit card details (securely!) to their servers for verification. Once you receive that you can then tell your site's user that their transaction has been verified and that their product(s) are on their way to them. That's very simplified, but that's how it works here!

[gsx]

Or... some credit card merchants give you a link to a page, where you merely forward the visitor to and they make the payment on their secure payment page. WorldPay permit this, also permit customising to some degree, including custom header, footer, graphics and colours.

[oilman]

There are so many good packages out there that work well with templates and so forth that unless you are in it for the learning experience it's probably not worth the effort to roll your own unless you have some very specific requirements. Most hosting companies these days have something like Miva or Americart preinstalled and configured for you and then there's the url pages already mentioned that Worldpay and VeriSign use which work quite well.

[Andrew Thomas]

Oilman, thats what i was thinking - although my host only allows ASP (no component ors Dll's allowed) so ive been looking through hotscripts and found a few i may use, from this i could look at their ASP files and learn it myself for future use.

Thanks for all the posts