Open For Business
While vetting through a list of Open Source e-Commerce scripts … I found these two.
We’ve heard of Phpshop, OSCommerce, ZenCart, and the plethora of others in the market – I must have fallen asleep and missed these two. I will attempt playing with it granted ‘time’ is on my side. ..
{note to self: that reminds you’d have to call the people involved in the project you’re currently undertaking!!}
Magento – Magento’s Single Page Checkout keeps customer’s order information visible at all times, allowing customers to continuously review order information and easily make changes without pressing the back button; To make life a little easier on customers, Magento includes Ship to Multiple Addresses functionality, allowing customers to complete all of their shopping in one transaction; Magento offers advanced catalog and shopping cart price rule systems right out of the box … and Magento includes a variety of features to enhance your store’s SEO, including built-in natural search optimization, easily-editable metadata, and social shopping tools like reviews and tags that encourage dynamic, product-related content. – and all that in a neat package – I spent almost 2 hours looking at this and asking myself – looks too yummy to be true!
{note to self: Stop eating the Breakfast beef striploin already will ya!!}
Suddenly with the Social Bang which sprung from green-conscious webdevelopers worldwide, came a plethora of other social sites – networking plus business from Xing, to Facebook, to Shopit. I wonder what’s the business idea behind shopit – where do they eventually make money running a platform like that – through percentages of sold products {where you get a minimal for promoting others’, or … }. Would this suffice for a brick+mortar business vying for online presence ? I don’t think it is feasible enough – looks enticing, but not hot enough to grab my attention. You could easily open a page on Facebook, and sell to the five hundred million members there instead non ?
Is e-tailing a trend or the real deal ?
Apart from Shopit, you have the much hyped about Zlio – what’s the dirt on these social e-commerce sites popping up lately ? Well, with Zlio you don’t sell your own products but those that are ‘furnished’ therein the suppliers from Amazon through 3Suisses through HP – as a ’store-owner’ with Zlio, you earn a certain percentage if your friends, families or clients purchase these from there. And until your brand is generic, there is little hope to sell your products with Zlio. Will these be shipped worldwide, or just to a certain region within a certain backyard ? We have to ensure that once you’re online, and unless specified, you’re opened to the WORLD., and as much as many of my other American friends might disagree, the WORLD out there, is beyond the US, of A.
{note to self: Write the report and email it to the Secretary General – he needs to know what needs to be implemented in the new office, once we move out there}
PrestaShop comes with a complete built WYSIWYG Editor – that is something I love since I started on Mambo/Joomla; Bar codes facility, and customizable delivery status notification e-mails {neat idea!}; Friendly URLS and Google Check-out! .. should try this one out, and soon too. Between these two ? and OSCommerce and Zencart… now that’s gonna be a tough decision. … unless you have an idea ?
I wonder who came up with the nom, Plici - sounds neither French, German or Business. Hopefully the script would come in handy for the designer developer who’ll be working to setup e-commerce sites in the future. Though using less modules with better features than OSCommerce and raved about in many European media, I wonder how different and capable is it to OSCommerce, and perhaps ZenCart ?
If you’re using Joomla or Drupal as a backend, what would your e-commerce platform be? Are you constrained to just Virtuemart, or Ubercart ? or should one just shake hands with eBay, and welcome the middlemen back into business lifestyle ? Care to share your thoughts on this ?
Tagged: Business, Commerce, Open Source, Social