Re: E-commerce with Linux

[Tim Hart <codermsu@gmail.com>]

It definitely depends on the scope of your project.

Most commerce packages on shared web hosting are going to have some issues.  It looks like Pair is simply referring you to a credit card processor and not providing anything additional than going directly to one yourself.  Setting up a merchant account and jumping through all the hoops to get payment processing going is never fun.

Google Checkout, Amazon payments, paypal, might be the easy route.  You will probably pay more fees to them than Authorize.net, Chase Paymentech, etc., but those options take more time to setup.  And they might not give you very good rates or hold your funds until you have sold X amount, especially if your product is currently just a pitch or vaporware.  If you need a higher end feature like recurring billing for subscriptions or something, then these would be the way to go for sure.

If you plan to sell a relatively low volume, I would recommend something like Magento go!.  There is a lot of providers in this realm, but some are a decent option.  Magento is also available open source (and commercial versions) for installation on your own server.  Its php/mysql on zend framework.  Ubercart is another DIY option, built on drupal.  Unless you have a dev background, I would highly recommend going the SaaS route.  

I don't know of any ecommerce books worth reading, as far as implementation is concerned.  This topic is so broad and the use cases are usually very different per store.  There is no good one-size fits option.  There are tons of issues worth discussing with every piece of cart software I've ever used.  

I recommend launching a store with the minimum amount of technical effort first and focus on selling the product.  Fail quickly. Refine/refactor. Test. Analyze outcomes.. repeat.  Dev & implementation time, effort and money generally aren't worth it until you have a successful product proven to sell well online.  

The moral of the story is its a lot more complicated than it seems.  Ecommerce has a lot of moving parts.  Technical investment limits flexibility to try other things when the first guess didn't work.  

tim

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 5:22 PM, <jon.drews@gmail.com> wrote:

Can anyone suggest a book on setting up a web site for commerce? I see that Pair has credit card payment and shopping cart plug-ins but I need a little more info on how to do it.
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