Online jewellery store help.

I agree that lean and light is desirable, but so is scalability. What starts out as a simple store will often mutate into a far more complex beastie if it is successful. This is much more likely to happen to an online store than, say, a corporate website.

Regarding UK payment gateways, SECPay has a really nice easy to use API for integation with your cart via SOAP or XML-RPC. And they’re reasonably priced.

Quote from: sottwell at Mar 13, 2008, 09:16 AM

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.

I wasn’t sure about this. I seem to recall reading where Scotty said it shouldn’t be too difficult to integrate another API but maybe I was drinking a few too many Porters that day.

E-Commerce is the dream of all small business who sell products and certain services and the bane of most designers to implement in a sane fashion. The ultimate would be a cart system that offered few features and was built with a robust API that would allow addons to handle inividualizations w/o hacks or too much extra baggage.

I think that eCommerce will be much better off in MODx after 097 hits the street. Yay a complete API. No Hacks and lots of hooks. Something even a php grashopper like me can get excited about.

Thanks for all your input guys. My friend is calling me later on so I’ll get a better idea from him what he wants to be included. I’ll post back here once I find out exactly what is required.

@sottwell, thanks for that tip. I’ve been installing a few carts on my xampp and still haven’t got around to CubeCart.

@therebechips, haven’t looked a SECPay. The only gateways I’ve looked into so far is GoogleCheckout, PayPal Pro, NetBanx and Cybersource (although still waiting for a reply from). But I’ve mainly be looking at what out-of-the-box gateways FoxyCart is offering first.

@smashingred, .97 soon I hope.

@rossco, it’ll be nice to hear what type of typical feature or requirements your friends wants. I’m yet to have my meeting about our carting needs.

The cart I’ve been asked to develop where I work doesn’t need to be very complex. But as with all clients what start of simple instantly becomes a mess because Joe Bloggs has seen a cool feature on xya.com and now wants on our cart system. Ahhhh! Although I’ve been highly seduced by Magento’s showreel on there site but still haven’t tried it yet though.

Well, i’ve just got off the phone to my mate about his website and he’s looking for something that has a full inventory, stock check, sales analysis etc etc so I think foxycart is out the door which is a same. I really like the whole integration it has but it’s just lacking a lot of key things. I think Magento is looking promising.... i bet it would look great integrated in to modx.... HINT HINT LOL.

So how would you guys go... modx for a home page, info pages about the company and contacts etc with Magento styled the same way or would you just go with Magento on it’s own?

You could install Magento on the same domain but folder it to something like domain.com/store then skin it to look seamless. Unless you run your whole site as an eCart CMS then I guess skin the cart<>site is how its done.

From there be it either in same or a seperate db you could make connections to link tables in a similar fashion to how I suppose how the SMF bridging works. This is something I’m going to look into as not sure about just how much work it would involve. I know it goes against a lot of comments here about but with the comments you can get a feel for what carts to avoid.

I was thinking that I would create the site in modx and have everything that is not related to a cart on there. Help pages, about, contacts, care for the jewelry etc etc and the shop link would either bring up the cart software in a lightbox just like how foxy runs. I was looking at magento and it’s looking pretty nice. I’ll see how it acts in a lightbox as there are a couple that allow webpages to be loaded up. I won’t have a login feature for the modx site as the shop will handle all the info. It will be 2 different sites, same skin, 1 login but look like it’s one site due to the lightbox overlay. I will see how the test goes on my test site and I will be using virtual PC to see how it runs on older version of IE etc. I also have 3 physical pcs, one running Vista (cough) 2 running ubuntu. I can’t really think of any other way to do it really. I like using MODx and my friend wants a shop that can do the whole stock take and analysis etc.

From what I see the API isn’t ready yet. I only done a quick search on their site and as far as I can see there’s not one. I’m sure the modx community will be hoping something like Magento can be tied in to modx some how.

Magento has done what looks to be a good job. If I had a site that was purely sales-driven with just a few extra pages of content, I’d be tempted to stick with just the ecommerce platform.

I’m want to stick with modx as I am starting to understand it more and hopefully stick with it as it matures. It’s something that has grown on me and I’m understanding it more everyday. I really hope something like magento can be integrated with modx very soon. I know 9.7 is on the way out with lots more features, i’ve searched everywhere for a possible release date and I can’t find anything.

As for my friends site, I might go 100% magento since it’s purely online sales and there is an option to create extra pages. It will suit his needs...