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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Web Design: PHP shop applications

14:02 / 17.10.07

Ok so I only generally lurk this particular board, but I’m in need of some advice I hope somebody has, at the moment my head hurts from all the options.

Basically my girlfriend is starting her own jewellery business and I’m building the online shop. Now, I have experience with CMS's and corporate level bespoke shops, but I’ve never used an open source php one. And here in lies the problem.

From what I can see there are 3 main (*note maintained) shopping systems, Zen Cart, Virtue Mart (over Joomla!) and OSCommerce. At least I think that’s all there is, I can't seem to find a comprehensive comparison or review of the main systems. I have tested Zen Cart and it seems overly complicated, both frontend and admin system. Virtue Mart, as I’ve mentioned, sits over Joomla! but I don't really see the value in having a full cms sat there in the background. OSCommerce seems simple to implement but (from what I can glean) isn't template based, which I think will be an issue.

I would be hugely grateful if anyone could tell me of their experience using any of the above, or indeed recommend a system to use!

20:53 / 17.10.07

Our web team has deployed a Zen Cart solution for two sites at my place of work and it has been running pretty solid for us over the past few years. Unfortunately, I'm not the developer on these systems (we hired out for this portion of the work), so I can only speak to what it's been like to use and integrate into.

We are looking into adding more store functionality to these sites when we get the time, but we haven't been able to get to it just yet. We did pick up this desk reference since it was recommended to us by a few people.

11:42 / 21.10.07

Have you looked at other jewellery sites selling a similar product to your girlfriend's designs?

That's what I would do if I were you. I'm very interested in what you end up choosing and how it goes for you since I am planning to set up a similar thing very soon.

What kind of jewellery does your girlfriend make?

14:19 / 22.10.07

One of my friends from a design board actually sent me an email about her experiences with OSCommerce. She was saying that it’s important to get a developer who knows what they are doing to help with skinning the shop as it can be quite difficult, but that the admin system is very easy to use. She also voiced concerns with the security in OSCommerce.

She also suggested I check out Shopify which is a hosted, paypermonth, system. It looks quite easy to skin using their tool and would be a good option if you didn't want to develop anything. It also includes, by the looks of it, credit card authorisation.

For myself it's looking more and more likely that I’ll go with OSCommerce. I have enough php experience to skin the shop without too much trouble, I think/hope and it comes built-in with lots of payment solutions, authorzise.net, PayPal etc etc.
But the main thing for me here is that I already have a MediaTemple server and can host the solution, cutting out a monthly fee.

It's that hard thing of balancing the solution vs. cost. To begin with it has to be as cheap as possible, so we'll probably be using standard PayPal, but also want the ability to scale with success, both backend and front.
If I host it and we go via PayPal standard there is basically £0 monthly cost and a small upfront for an SSL certificate (if we use one right away).

As for my girlfriends jewellery, here are some piccies from the promotional shoot she did;

09:39 / 26.10.07

I run an online jewellery shop that runs on a mix of my own (slightly dodgy) PHP and the plain ol' PayPal cart. It suits my needs as I don't have a huge range of different products at any one time - it would take far longer for me to rewrite my whole site in a cart than it does to simply add a few lines of PHP to my site every month or two. If you're not looking to have a lot of fast-moving stock, it might be worth looking into that - the PayPal cart, although limited in some ways, couldn't be easier to integrate to an existing site.

I've done a lot of research into other carts, though, and Zen Cart and OScommerce are the only two that I would seriously consider.

OScommerce is powerful and very impressive - hugely flexible and extensible, and a nice, easy CMS front end if your girlfriend (who I'm guessing isn't quite so into PHP) wants to handle that herself. OScommerce does require a reasonable investment of time from the developer, though - there's a lot of tinkering needed to get a satisfactory shop up and running.

To grossly oversimplify, Zen Cart is basically an extension of OScommerce, aimed at people who don't want to get their hands quite so dirty - it's much more of an out of the box solution, aimed at people who don't necessarily require bespoke functionality and are happy to basically reskin rather than program from scratch. The flipside, of course, is that it has its own limitations with regard to layout, etc. - a lot of Zen Cart shops look like Zen Cart shops, you know? - and, as you've said, the front end is a little fussy.

If you'd like to have a proper chat about any aspect of running this sort of business without seriously derailing this thread, I'd be happy to have a chat and give you and your girlfriend some general pointers. Feel free to PM me (or ignore me if I'm teaching you to suck eggs, natch).

09:53 / 26.10.07

Ooh, and while I remember: if memory serves, OScommerce is better from an SEO point of view - you can tinker about with the meta tags for each individual page, whereas I think Zen Cart only allows you to change the meta tags for specific types of pages, and uses a blanket approach to the others.

12:47 / 29.10.07

Mkt > Many thanks for your reply! I will most probably hit you up for some advice if I run into trouble, which i most probably will haha. Right now I’m still in the design stage, although i am basing the pages around what OSCommerce can do, so looks like I’ve subconsciously chosen that solution :P