building an e-commerce webpage?

[Chloe]

Hi,
I am engaging in building an e-commerce webpage for a friend, and I am really new for this project. The point is I wanted to learn how to build an e-commerce page. Is there anyone there can tell me the steps I should take before starts designing an e-commerce site?
For eg, Identify the users requirment,
Which language, PHP or ASP to use? .....
thanks

[Buffy]

Gosh. Find a *package* first. I've built a couple of e-commerce sites from scratch, and you'd be amazed at how complicated they are. I only recommend it if the client wants a *very* oddball set up or has unique requirements. If its just, "I have a catalog, I have prices, I have discounts, I have customers, they come back," you're much better off with a packaged solution. Now that being said, I don't have any favorites among the dozens out there, and it will mostly have to do with what you want to do. Also, if its "customizable" (as opposed to being a plug-in libary), pick the language base you're most familiar with. There are lots of people who will say "*Never* use ASP" but if that's what you know, don't let them talk you into learning PHP as a requirement for getting paid for this project.

Good luck!
Buffy

[Chloe]

Packages? you mean the e-commerce packages or solutions, like Godaddy.com provide?

[alexander]

here:
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Script...rce/index.html

You can find many packages, free and not so free fir building an e-commerce site. But using a package does not dismiss you from learning PHP as you will probably need to tweak things, patch and so forth to get a decent e-commerce site up. PHP is a great langage, go to their homepage and read all about it (www.php.net)

Oh and NEVER use ASP!!! Or in that case any Microsoft products, any proprietary, closed-source, slow, bloated products with no decent features and below average usability and speed

[Buffy]

Yep. I don't know what Godaddy is "providing" although I assume its only for stuff they host for you. All hosting companies have a selection of packages, some are all-in-one, some break out just payment processing or customer management or inventory management or shopping cart or whatever (you can mix and match if you're a good enough hacker), but this is *a lot* easier than reinventing the wheel. If you don't know where you're going to host it, shop around for companies (Tormod and I both like Crystaltech, and they have about a dozen or so different plugins and packages), and look at what they bundle as this is going to be the cheapest way to go. You can also buy packages and host them anywhere. The basic idea is that all the core functions are already there, and you can spend your time on making it look/work the way you want (actually Hypography is an example: the guts of these boards are from vBulletin, and the Hypography Dev Team customizes it for our blathering pleasure).

Cheers,
Buffy

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by alexander

Oh and NEVER use ASP!!! Or in that case any Microsoft products, any proprietary, closed-source, slow, bloated products with no decent features and below average usability and speed

knew we'd hear that from you alexander! I've still got a lot of legacy ASP apps, and unless you're offering to rewrite them for free...

Honestly, I'm moving everything to JSP/Beans technology. I understand the attraction of PHP and its widely used but Java is gonna be the long-term winner...

Hackingly yours,
Buffy

[Tormod]

Hypography is actually moving towards PHP and away from ColdFusion...mostly due to the fact that it is easier to maintain a PHP project than a ColdFusion project on a volunteer basis.

[alexander]

Originally Posted by Buffy

knew we'd hear that from you alexander! I've still got a lot of legacy ASP apps, and unless you're offering to rewrite them for free...

I dont know about free, but i can rewrite them. How big of applications are they? Do you have the code for them (this is a big one)? I'm sure that i can do a few smaller ones, as long as its not a very big investment of time, hey i havent coded in PHP in a bit, so i dont see why not

Originally Posted by Buffy

Honestly, I'm moving everything to JSP/Beans technology. I understand the attraction of PHP and its widely used but Java is gonna be the long-term winner

Not unless they release all the code it wont

[Tormod]

Chloe, there is a piece of software called Cartweaver which is what we use for our store. It is used by a lot of newbies and come in both ColdFusion and ASP flavors. It's found at http://www.cartweaver.com/

Like Buffy mentions, Crystaltech is a host which also offer packages - recently they started offering free carts (ZenCart) which is based on PHP. The problem with choosing packages like that is that you pretty much tie yourself into one host, meaning that I don't know if ZenCart can be moved to another host after a while.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by Tormod

...moving towards PHP and away from ColdFusion...

Oh amen! I always considered CF to be more proprietary than ASP, even though its more functional.

Also on picking a language: you may know ASP, but .NET is not ASP, and for the ramp up, you're going to spend the same amount of time and be better off learning PHP or JSP. Note my fondness for JSP has more to do with scalability and web service integration than any "superiority" of the language, and PHP is cheaper, more accessible (from the hosting availability standpoint), and has a big user/programmer base.

Cheers,
Buffy