Custom Ecommerce Development

When setting up an e-commerce solution for a customer there are some key first steps to make the project successful. The first and most important step is determining the right e-commerce solution for the customer; if this step is done incorrectly then you will have nothing but problems later. The best way to determine this is to ask what the customer will be selling, find out how much product they currently sell in their retail store if they have one, how many products do they have to sell, do those products come in different shapes, sizes, colors, how is inventory currently controlled, is inventory control issue?

Once you get a feel for how many products they will be selling and how much business they could potentially do online and how inventory is managed the next step is to determine if their suppliers will need access to the site for inventory reasons, will customers have the ability to view order status online, look at past invoices, recall old orders so they can reorder them, etc.

Once you have this info you will then have a pretty good idea of what e-commerce package they should start with, if you answers are they have a large number of products, a large retail business, have to perform inventory control and want customers to have an online order center then you will want to use a larger e-commerce package that has some flexibility in letting you building your own business rules and will scale to the number of transactions you estimate doing.

For a solution like this we use the Intershop4 Platform which will theoretically scale to an unlimited number of transactions because of its ability to be distributed across multiple servers. If this is a smaller business, with say less than 100 products and they don't have a huge need for online inventory control or online order management you would want to use a smaller package, we use Cart32 which has the ability to use customer databases of products and have a user database but is not as robust or scalable as the Intershop4 application. There are also times when the customers need is so complex that it may be necessary to build your own commerce solution and tie it in directly with a payment gateway, we have the ability to do any of these solutions but the key is initial planning and knowing the business you customer wants to run online.

Developing an e-commerce solution can take a few weeks or several months depending on the size, typically a smaller commerce solution only takes about a week but this depends on rather the customer will process credit cards online or just their existing processing machine they have at their retail site, the customer may also want their own SSL certificate which takes about a week to obtain and install on the server, larger installations require database setup, Intershop4 licenses, merchant accounts, SSL certificates so the time frame to completion can range from a month to several months.

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