Online jewellery store help.

Hi, my friend owns and runs his own jewellery business here in the uk and has asked me if i can create a web site with a online store. Basically what i want is ideas on what the best way would be to go with this. My idea is to use modx for the main design with the usual info pages but what would i be best to use for the shopping cart? He has a merchant account so he wants to take card payments like any other store. Could you guys give me ideas on what would be best. It must look legit and professional. Ross

http://www.foxycart.com/ and Modx work well together I believe.

I’m sitting at work writing up ideas and ditto foxycart did come to mind. Thing is i was thinking about how to monitor sales and how would a customer be able to keep track of past and current orders? Is there anyway to tie this in to foxycart and modx?

You could check out TreasureChest which I believe should fit your needs well.
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=20173

Cheers,

Andreas

To be honest I’m not sure Foxycart is ready to be a substitute for a dedicated system. Integration with the UK payment gateway of your choice, export/import of Sage or Quickbooks products/orders data, newsletters, lead lists based on purchased products, wish lists, vouchers, promotions, volume discounts, multiple delivery options, recommended products, order history... I currently run two online stores and I can assure you that you will want all this and more, just to stay competitive.

This looks to be the most promising open source e-commerce solution at the moment, I would absolutely love to see this properly integrated with MODx at some point:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

I’m in the same UK cart. I want to use FoxyCart and MODx as it’s simple to get going, but how best do I manage all the backoffice admin type stuff.

..haven’t asked in the Foxyforum mind you!

The other option I guess is to find a good cart and and skin it to look like your site. Thinking about the UK, Magento look nice and has GoogleCheckout, there’s also CubeCart which has GoogleCheckout and Royal Mail option but haven’t tried that yet.

Let us know what you find especially being UK based..

The problem with 90 percent of OS e-commerce applications is that they try to be all things to all people. Zen-Cart (an oxymoron), OS Commerce and even Magento attempt to try an incorporate so many elements of existing CMS or portals that you invariably end up with a slow shop no matter how you slice it. Configuring and managing a small shop should be as simple as an instore transaction for the user. To achieve this less features are better.

For a small operation do you need to have Quikbooks or Sage (formerly Simply Accounting) integration? If every e-commerce solution had to have the features that would make everyone happy, you end up with a sledgehammer to crack walnuts.

Lean and light is ideas. Foxycart should have their UK payment gateways up and running and I understand getting into Royal Mail is not simple but doable.

TreasureChest should be from what I understand, not that hard to migrate to a payment gateway as many of them have a fairly decent APIs but if your friend needs a shop but you aren’t prepared to get dirty coding then I would look at Magento. As I said ZenCart is about as zen as a shopping mall on a Christmas weekend.

The problem with a shopping cart for MODx is that everyone’s cart is unique, be it gateway, paypal, delivery, products and more. Building one that fits all needs is redundant and you may as well just use one of the above. Building a custom cart for MODx has been done the problems lie in someone trying to take someone elses cart on antother stack and make it work the same but different.

Cheers,

Jay

Treasure chest is built around one method of PayPal access; that was all it was intended to be. It would be a major overhaul to have it do anything else.

@smashingred, enlightening as always.

I like the simplicity of TreasureChest but I need more UK payment gateways so for me FoxyCart is the only glove at the moment. Haven’t looked fully into how to integrate Royal Mails API but there are plenty of postcode suppliers dealing with SOAP and XML so something will work.

At the moment I’m in the situation of wanting to use FoxyCart but a bit stuck - http://forum.foxycart.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=271&page=1#Item_0, but also just how much of the backend does your typical client need (loosely based term)!?!

I’m going out on a limb here as I’ve not yet had any client experience with cart request, but in my own research of finding a cart to use and looking at likes of ViArt Store the amount of features is enough, well its starting to put me off. Same with Volusion, not sure about CubeCart or Magento as haven’t looked at them yet.

One thing I’m not sure about is how FoxyCart deals with things like being able to order track, sales based usage and so on and then how much customizing is needed. I suppose there always more then one answer but there must be typical request. But I’m guessing FoxyCart does the shop bit, you then take the XML datafeed and put it into your CRM or accounting solution. Which I suppose gets away from the dread all-in-1 answer.

Now I’m rambling..

Cubecart is a nightmare to work with; there are tons of "mods" for just about anything you might want to do, but every mod involves hacking the core code at specified locations, so piling mod on top of mod becomes hellish, and then you can kiss any thought of upgrading good-by.