Creating an E-Commerce Site

Interestingly cre­at­ing my first ecom­merce site is what really got me inter­ested in web design as more of a full time job. When I set out to create a ‘web shop’ for AS|ONE cloth­ing over two years ago I knew what I was look­ing for, the hard part was find­ing some­thing that was both man­age­able, easily inte­grated and most impor­tantly afford­able for a small business.

Here is a short list of what I was look­ing for in an ecom­merce package:

Ease of Man­age­ment – I need some­thing that had a strong back end man­age­ment system.
Inven­tory Con­trol – Not to inten­sive but some inven­tory con­trol was nec­es­sary.
Pay­ment Inte­gra­tion – Abil­ity to check out and accept pay­ment easily.
Cus­tomiza­tion – I need it to look like my exist­ing site.
Secu­rity – I wanted cus­tomers to feel safe when shopping.

It’s not the com­plete list but these are some of the fea­tures that I felt to be most impor­tant. I searched and searched, read­ing reviews and tes­ti­mo­ni­als and finally I was able to decide on one solu­tion. The solu­tion that I decided to go with hap­pened to be Cube Cart, which at the time was com­pletely free and very well sup­ported with a number of plu­g­ins, mods and a very active forum com­mu­nity. It is always impor­tant to me that there be a good number of people actively involved in cre­at­ing a better prod­uct. No matter how tech­ni­cally savvy one might be there are always ques­tions that arise and some­times it is just a whole lot easier to search out an exist­ing answer.

I down­loaded the pro­gram, installed it to my server and began dig­ging through the code. Boy was I over­whelmed, but between my brother and I and about a month of solid back and forth emails, phone calls and skype ses­sions we were able to cre­at­ing the per­fect solu­tion. The orig­i­nal Cube Cart was now fully cus­tomized both in design and usabil­ity and my new eshop was ready to roll. As a pay­ment option I decided to first test the waters by inte­grat­ing my exist­ing PayPal account as the pay­ment proces­sor of choice. Using my exist­ing PayPal account I was able to limit the fees that would nor­mally be charged by a full fledged mer­chant account and at the same time offer my cus­tomer full secu­rity. With PayPal my cus­tomer is able to browse the store, pick out an item and drop it into the cart. They are then asked to sign up for an account and when final pay­ment is nec­es­sary they are momen­tar­ily redi­rected to PayPal to com­plete the trans­ac­tion. No Credit or Bank­ing info is stored on my server. When it is all said and done they are returned to my site and thanked for their purchase.

After almost two years of using Cube Cart I was alerted to the fact that they had made some seri­ous upgrades and were offer­ing the new and improved ver­sion for a very small fee. License expi­ra­tion: none. That’s right it’s a one time fee. So I figure if it isn’t broke why try to fix it, and hap­pily pur­chased the new copy.

Since my ini­tial bout with cre­at­ing an ecom­merce site, my knowl­edge of both ecom­merce and web design in gen­eral has increased ten fold. I have worked with a number of other solu­tions some pretty good and some that lead much to be desired. But in the end I still stand by my orig­i­nal provider and will con­tinue to do so until I find that it is no longer useful. When you are on the search for a new ecom­merce solu­tion I highly rec­om­mend that you gain some knowl­edge on what is out there and find the one that best suits your needs. Many of the carts avail­able today are very cus­tomiz­able and with the right knowl­edge you can easily be on your way to launch­ing a fully func­tional online store.