Software for e-commerce 3

[nickjp]

I am currently designing a site for my mom's craft business.
Would appreciate input as to best Web-site hosting company for e-commerce (she is on a budget of $ 35 mo or less) and any software other than Front page, that has shopping cart, etc. I am 14 and have knowledge of HTML and other applications and I have previously designed sites but not for e-commerce. Thanks.

 

[tanderso]

Some of my clients have had luck with

http://www.datapipe.com.

I'm not sure if they do the cheap solutions though. My company provides hosting too. There are websites which rate multiple hosting companies. Do a search on your favorite search engine for hosting comparison sites. You can decide the trade-off of price vs features that you prefer.

You can get freeware ecommerce packages on script sites (like

http://cgi.resourceindex.com).

That would be the way to go if you know Perl, PHP, or whatever language your freeware script is written in. Or you could license commercial software. My company provides that too. But, if you're looking for a inexpensive solution, you're going to have to get your hands dirty and do most of the manual work yourself.
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.

http://www.oac-design.com

 

[foxdev]

It's probably a bit late, but I use Miva Merchant v3. Though I'm a developer by trade, I didn't want to devote the hundreds of hours it would take to write my own. Miva Merchant is pretty powerful and fairly easy to use.

My Web hoster provides the hosting that includes a MM license for under $30/month. Credit card processing fees (if yo are going that route) are completely separate and extra. Robert Bradley

http://www.foxdev.com/

Coming Soon:

http://www.lowcostprints.com

http://www.agrainofhope.org

 

[RSedlacek]

Robert,

Care to share who your Miva hosting provider is?

Thanks,
Randy

 

[foxdev]

Actually, Randy, I'd love to share that bit of info. I have no stake in this hosting company and I pay the same rate as everyone else, but I recommend them to my colleagues and I have 3 sites running on them, at various levels of service.

They are Webaxxs,

http://www.webaxxs.net

The full Miva Merchant 3 (I use it for

http://www.lowcostprints.com

) is included in their eCommerce package, $29.95/mo. I use their $15.95 package for my other sites (400 Mb disk space, lots of scripts, etc.). I can't say enough good things about them. Robert Bradley

http://www.lowcostprints.com

http://www.foxdev.com/

http://www.agrainofhope.org

 

[oculus]

Robert:

Just wanted to say thanks for the tip on webaxxs.net. I'm new to this forum and just browsing through the threads. I have checked out webaxxs and am impressed.

BTW: how easy/difficult is it to customize the layout w/ Miva? I've seen some pretty nice customizations, but don't know how much is involved. Do you need to know HTML extremely well to do it?

Thanks for the info.


Bill.
bell@go-envision.com

 

[foxdev]

Miva: one way to put it is that there are three levels of customization:

1) Turning on/off various check boxes and selecting various pre-built options in the built-in store builder.

2) In the store builder, adding text (which can include HTML) in the several dozen boxes for category tree header/footer, storefront header/footer, etc. Because this supports HTML, it lets you do a pretty fair amount of customization, and you control how complex you want to be (i.e. use plain text, some basic HTML, fancy stuff like forms, etc).

3) Modifying the Miva Merchant source scripts. The Miva scripts are server-side scripts that function like ASP. Obviously, there is a lot more complexity here, but gives you a huge amount of control.

In addition to the above, there is a large variety of after-market tools and modules that can plug in to Merchant.

There is a brand new Miva Merchant forum here at Tek-Tips:
forum810
if you want to continue this discussion.


Robert Bradley
Sr. DBA, some big company
cheap prints and oil paintings:

http://www.lowcostprints.com

 

[oculus]

Robert:

I made a new post in the MIVA forum. Thanks.


Bill.