Hi,

 

A potential client recently approached me with the following:

 

He currently has a website that contains information on a variety of topics, and also includes a shop. It is all run via WordPress. He wants the shop section to be removed from this site, and turned into its own stand alone "shop" - this is because the shop section feels a bit "lost" among all the other varied information the site provides. As it stands, there isn't a huge number of items currently available via this shop (less than 100) but obviously there needs to be the ability for more items to be added further down the line. Payments are currently taken via Paypal, and he doesn't want this to change with the new shop he is after.

 

So, in a nutshell:

 

What steps would you take to complete such a job?

 

What (preferably free) e-commerce platform/shopping cart would you recommend? I have been reading up on opencart, and like the look of it, but I have little experience of e-commerce at the moment. The main things I'm looking at here are; how difficult is it to customize with my own "theme", how secure is it and how easy will it be for the client to manage?

 

I'm basically thinking this is going to be too big a job for me to take on at the moment, but I am still curious as to what you guys would consider to be a good solution, if only for future reference!

 

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Kyle

Try Open Cart - its free and simple to setup and not to hard to change the designs etc..

Wow, lightning fast response! lol

 

Yeah I am definately veering towards that option at the moment.

 

In terms of implementing a shop via WordPress - as the client already has experience with it - is this a pretty restricted environment for such a process?

 

Just trying to look at all options.

 

 

Kyle

Wordpress has the WP Ecommerce plugin which is free.

I have used it once and found it ok... Wasnt overly excited.

That must be the plugin hes using for his current shop then, seeing as hes using WordPress.

 

Huw, in your portfolio, that Eriro Skateboards site you did, was that shopping cart implemented using opencart or the WordPress plugin you mentioned above??

 

 

Kyle

this is pretty helpful - so its fairly easy to skin the cart ? do you just go ahead and edit the html css and so forth as you would when building a web page from scratch?

 

think i may download this tomorrow and have a play to suss it out as it seems to be recommended alot

 

I am in the same position as you Kyle - tell me how you get on with it! I am nervous about this ecommerce project but so excited too!