eCommerce vs. CMS

Aarlev

Member
I'm currently working on a site for a small newly started business. It's going to be an online clothing store that'll require shopping cart features and a CMS for blogging and updating images etc.

For someone who has never built a site with an open source CMS or shopping software before what would you recommend? I've seen that there's a few shopping cart plugins for Wordpress. Would one of those do the job or are there better solutions?

Thanks!
Soeren
 
Depends on what sort of a design of a site you are going to be having as an ecommerce website.

Is it going to be the covnentional style? i.e. nav bar, products bar, new products section with a similiar layout to say amazon?

If so I'de go for something like Cubecart or Magento
 
All of the shopping cart plugins for Wordpress are poor. I've not come across one that works well.

Joomla however is suppose to have sterling e-commerce plugin. Sorry I can't remember what its called.
 
Yes as Lee says I would avoid using any sort of Wordpress plugin, Wordpress the platform itself as a CMS is not up to the job of an e-commerce site, so no matter how good a plugin you find it just won't have the features and ability to handle e-commerce.

Magento looks great, but I'm not sure how developed it is for the UK market, if you are looking at Magento as an option I would recommend checking out the UK section of the development forums before hand to ensure it's ready to use, in terms of VAT issues and the payment gateways it can support for the UK.

The other option, perhaps a safer one if you don't feel comfortable with the development side would be to outsource the build to a web developer, that way you could look to have something custom built or use their recommendations, allowing you to focus on the design side of things.

I'm sure some of the web developers on the forums will be along to make recommendations very soon. Thanks, Greg

EDIT- Looks like this thread will be a good one to keep your eye on - http://www.designforums.co.uk/web-c...-best-opensource-shopping-cart-ecommerce.html
 
Thanks a lot for your advice guys.

I'm pretty confident with XHTML/CSS but I've never built an ecommerce site before and have only used a bespoke CMS so far. Do you need any programming/back end skills to set up Magento (or other shopping cart software)? And will it then work as a CMS as well, or do I have to set up a CMS seperately and then implement Magento?
 
I think it all depends on what you need it to do, I think most setups have a basic CMS built-in, but all depends on the features and spec of the site you're building, do you have an idea of what's required at this stage?
 
Greg said:
I think it all depends on what you need it to do, I think most setups have a basic CMS built-in, but all depends on the features and spec of the site you're building, do you have an idea of what's required at this stage?

Thanks Greg,

The content on the front page will consist of images only. And then there's going to be a shop section and a blog. In the early stages it'll be pretty small scale so I just need a system that'll let the client update images and add/delete products. And I need to be able to implement the blog part into the site design.

Maybe I'm biting off more than I can chew here?
 
Hiya

I have a couple of options that may interest you, so feel free to pm me.

Thanks
Michelle
 
Hi Michelle,

I think the OP is looking for suggestions in this thread at this stage, is there any you can share with us? Or are you referring to something your company would be able to custom code?

Welcome to Design Forums by the way :)
Greg
 
Hi Greg

Well, we have already created an online shop here, it's quite basic when you compare it to the likes of Magento but it's quite nice to use and would be relatively easy to reskin but obviously it's not open source which is why I was reluctant to add it to the thread!
 
Ahh OK, no problems and yes I understand, just wanted to double check, incase you had some other suggestions of opensource alternatives, etc :)
 
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