Hello All,

First let me tell you what I am looking for and what I have.

I am working with a small business that is growing rapidly worldwide. They need an better eCommerce Solution than they have now. Currently they a shopping cart but they manually process credit card. Then Copy Paste the shipping information into the USPS shipping then manually tape and go to the pot office to mail.

What I am looking for is to redo their entire site. Looking to have a nice WYSIWYG editor for them to use after I do the initial transfer. Then I want to slip stream their eCommerce to auto calculate shipping, and enable to print labels with one click.

We have been looking here to host the site and the store but would like to see what some other have made here and how its working.

OPEN  TO SUGGESTIONS
and QUESTIONS...


Thanks in Advance
WRRY

My links
http://twitter.com/TheeBayk1d
http://TheGeeksVent.com
http://WRRY.org

A few thoughts:

Many shopping carts can directly handle credit card payments, either through a payment gateway and merchant account, or through a third party payment system such as PayPal (and many workalikes). For low volumes, PayPal-like services would be cheaper, but as volume grows, a merchant account's lower per-transaction fees will begin to offset their monthly base charges. You can always change them over in the future. One thing to note is that merchant accounts set up for brick-and-mortar stores almost never permit eCommerce use (much riskier)! If that's what your client is doing, they'll be hung out to dry when their bank finds out. They will need a merchant account (if that's the route they take) that specifically permits web sales.

Most carts should be able to directly print shipping labels, such as on to sticky labels. They should also be able to print a shipping invoice to include in the shipment, and calculate shipping costs based on weight, size, distance (zone), etc. Some are rather complex to set up.

Are you looking for a WYSIWYG editor to write product descriptions and such? I don't know of any eCommerce solutions that do that directly, though you might be able to graft on a client-side editor such as TinyMCE. You also might look at using a page editor such as Page Mason, Dreamweaver, Nvu, Expression Web, etc. to create the HTML for them, and then cut and paste it over to the store. Some of the solutions that add a store onto a CMS such as Joomla or Drupal (Ubercart is one) might give you a built-in WYSIWYG editor.

Don't limit yourself to shopping carts offered by Fantastico (cPanel) or Web Applications (LPCP). Others will work. Just be aware of what are the exact prerequisites it needs, before trying to install one. For example, Magento needs MySQL to be using the InnoDB engine, rather than MyISAM, but only MyISAM is available on shared servers. You'd need a VPS or even dedicated to get InnoDB. Some carts are .Net, which may or may not work for you on a Linux server (you may have to go Windows).

Add: http://www.lunarforums.com/php_and_mysql_support/innodb_tables-t39465.0.html says that LPCP-based new shared-server accounts can have InnoDB. cPanel-based shared server accounts are still only MyISAM.

This Wikipedia entry compares a number of shopping carts, and could get you started on what questions to ask.

Trying to stick with one processing method for payment processing. It would be credit and if possible online check processing. The business is in many countries with orders coming worldwide but many pay with a check and mail it, other have different methods of payments.

The only people who use the online store are individuals. Wholesale and other orders are processed through Quickbooks and manually processed and they pay the fees if they choose to pay by credit card. I am unsure of their current mechant and what their polices are but they have been using them for over 5 years now, so I am sure they are good.

Currently the use AgoraCart. But the two biggest things I am looking for is,
Export Order information to QuickBooks
Use a 3rd Party Shipper or some type of solution to print packing slips and labels.

The process would go like this....
Customer accesses online store from website
Customer selects items and put them in shopping cart
Customer inserts shipping/billing/credit card info.
Cart calculates shipping costs including set packing costs
Cart shows customer overview and charges customer
Automatic email is sent thanking them for their order and saying they will receive a message on ship
We receive an email at order@(oursite).com
We make the order
Go to cart to print shipping/packing labels
mark as shipped
Customer gets email that their item has been shipped

daily or automatically or however we export the customer information to Quickbooks


I am looking for a WYSIWYG editor for the website so the company can make minor edits themself to content. I was thinking of something like wordpress. I have yet to see any solutions that seem to work for this up front.

The hardest part finding is the printing postage.

In an ideal world,
We would use Lunar Pages to host the site and store
Storefront with x company
Process payments with xy company
Ship with UPS/USPS with auto labels and postage via xyz (Stamps.com?) company
Manage information with Quickbooks

Thanks for all your help...

I will be going through everything I can to find the best solution for this company to implement in Summer of 2010

WRRY

My links
http://twitter.com/TheeBayk1d
http://TheGeeksVent.com
http://WRRY.org

This is a very old post but i wanna post anyway. I have tested OScommerce, tried Joomla extensions, tried agora, wordpress store and two commercial softwares "which" are rubbish...

When i tried those i am using zen cart for more than months... I am just experimenting because i wanna put up another store for other products...

i found out that i cannot leave zen cart...its a very powerful script and support at the forum by free members are awesome.

If you are asking for examples , i must say that you should visit the link given here. Its a great eCommerce site and might be beneficial for you.