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E Commerce Process
Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 4:40 pm
by namwith
Hi,
My client is a design agency and wants me to give an estimate on an ecommerce project. I'm very experienced in web development but for some reason have yet to take on an eCommerce site. Basically I am interested in hearing what steps are involved with this project, what questions I should be asking and what issues I should be looking out for. What would you do to complete this project?
Anyhow they gave me some annoyingly limited information. Here it is:
The client is a wine importer with an existing inventory system and credit card processing. They don't yet have a website.
They need the product database syncronised with their inventory system.
They have 60-70 products.
They will need an admin utility.
They sell only wine.
I don't know what their inventory runs off of.
I know that they will need a cart, and I've gathered its easiest to snag an opensource cart app. I most need to resolve what is involved in syncing up the inventory and processing the credit card payments.
Any help would be exceptional.
Thanks!
Ron
Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 4:43 pm
by Joe
Firstly, tell your hourly rate

You should then think about asking questions on how this cart should look, what it should do for users aswell as administrators etc. Just think about it.

Re: E Commerce Process
Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 3:25 am
by onion2k
namwith wrote:The client is a wine importer with an existing inventory system and credit card processing. They don't yet have a website.
They need the product database syncronised with their inventory system.
Theres really no way to give an accurate estimate until you know what they're using now. They may be using a proper stock management system with hooks for ecommerce process, which would make you life quite easy.. or they could be using an old DOS program one of the employees wrote in QBasic running on a 386 in the corner of the warehouse.. and your life would be a nightmare. What you need to do is talk to them. While using an existing open source solution isn't a bad idea, don't expect it to do everything your client requires. For example, a wine merchant will probably want to sell wine by the case.. which means only allowing users to buy things in batchs of 12 (or 13 if the wine merchant is like the place I buy wine from).
As for Joe's "advice".. Firstly clients rarely agree to an hourly rate, they'll want either a day rate with a maximum number of days, or a flat rate for the entire project. Secondly, the look and front end of the site comes last, and if you're writing the site properly using CSS it can be changed completely without any code differences anyway. Joe is right about finding the requirements for the front- and back-ends of the application though.
Re: E Commerce Process
Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 3:51 am
by namwith
They may be using a proper stock management system with hooks for ecommerce process, which would make you life quite easy..
Great info! Would you happen to know any examples of stock management systems I could research up on? How exactly would these hooks for ecommerce work?
Thanks!
Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2004 4:30 am
by onion2k
The only one I've dealt with at all is called EuroMacs .. its the european version of something called Macs. Somehow I doubt a company with 60-70 products would be using it though, the company I was dealing with had in the region of 100,000 products. The ecommerce bits hook in via services like SOAP and XMLRPC.
Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 7:37 pm
by feyd
I was cruising through Macromedia's site the other day and noticed a very nice interface system that could work very well for eCommerce systems like a Wine merchant called
Flex
From what I've seen, if your server has Java support enabled, you can install it. Their demo is quite nice as well..
--feyd
note I am not connected to Macromedia in any fashion, and I do not profit from any sale that may or may not happen.
Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 8:00 pm
by namwith
Hey thanks!
If there is anymore information out there about integrating web databases with inventory systems I would love to hear it.
I still haven't really figured out what exists in the land between my client's office inventory system / credit card processing and my PHP shopping cart.
What goes in this space and how do you use it? Help!