Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

My wife and I are planning to launch my small business and am at the phase where i want to implement a shopping cart / ecommerce solution. (My ebay store will open shortly as well).

Im a software developer by trade and would not mind using an open source solution as opposed to a hosted solution unless i can find a hosted solution that handles all my business needs (for the right price of course).

If anyone out there can provide me with feedback/reviews/direction that could help my narrow my shopping cart / ecommerce solution it would be greatly appreciated.

To give you a little background on what our company provides, here is a snippit from our business plan:

"... provide individuals with a unique and innovative avenue to express themselves and their personalities to others through customized, high quality invitations and messages in a bottle."

Thank in advance

Didn`t some guy last year have a web design company or something and also manufacture those messasge in a bottle thingies?

Are you getting your bottles from a guy named Will Smith or something like that? I think that was his name. He also was trying to peddle some shopping cart thing that he claimed was the best out there.

This is actually a new startup for us... we came up with the idea b/c we spend months researching the messages in a bottle and could not find any that appealed to us... usually the paper was not invitation quality. After a while we basically got supplies and created them ourselves and were much happier than the samples we received from the small amount of online shops.

The shopping cart solution that Im looking for would have to be able to handle showing images of different paper and font colors that a customer would choose... im not sure if this functionality would be available in any of the hosted solutions.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Ecommerce solutions arediscussed alot on SUN.

My recommendation is to use Zen Cart (free open source).

~roland

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Web Design | Best Beef Jerky | ecommerce articles | Follow vwebworld on Twitter

Roland, thanks for your feedback. Ive done some light research on OSCommerce and Zen Cart but havent devled into what they have to offer ... ill start researching Zen Cart.

Thanks again.

Magento was launched only four days ago.  I`ve been following it since it was first announced back in March, and using it almost non-stop for the past 48 hours.

It`s an incredible leap for e-commerce apps and is far and above Zen Cart, OScommerce, and all the others that currently dominate the open-source commerce market.

There are still plenty of bugs in Magento, but Varien, the team behind it, are working around the clock to launch new features and repair those bugs.

It probably won`t officially be ready for stable use for at least another two months, but I think it`s worth holding out for.

Here`s the link:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/


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Partner at YoungGoGetter.com

Thanks Travis. Ill check out Magneto.

My main concern with shopping cart software is that I need to ensure that the software can handle the sale of personalized products where the customer can enter personalized text that is later printed on their products.

Thanks again.

I do believe such a feature is on the roadmap for Magento.  Not sure how far down the line it is.  But I`d say if you`re after an application before the end of 2007, it would be a safer bet with another e-commerce app.

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Partner at YoungGoGetter.com

Do you mean like what BoxerHaus.com does ...????

http://www.boxerhaus.com/cgi-bin/acart/apple-search.pl?& id=1164050991&prodcodes=&keywords=welcome%20slate%20 sign

This sounds like what you are wanting to do, eh?

Thank you for the link blondieblue.... much appreciated.

This site is done with Apple Cart. Do you have any experience with Apple Cart. Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks again :)