Custom Shopping Cart

Are you creative? Are you a dreamer? Do you have lot of ideas about how to leverage yourcompany.com to generate business? Do you honestly think that a commercial shopping cart will be flexible enough to accompany you down the constantly changing roads you choose and create? Obviously not. But be careful, there are many expensive mistakes to be made with custom solutions. Make no mistake, it is a long road to setting up a good website. On long roads flexibility is essential, custom-made is the only answer.

There are so many blind alleys to go down when it comes to web E-Commerce? How much time to do want to spend doing that? Maintain control with a custom shopping cart solution that starts from simple beginnings and slowly evolves. It is actually much less expensive, even in the short term and you will not believe how much you will learn about deploying custom written smart and secure web pages that are database-smart. The cost of a custom cart can be much less than the overall and hidden costs and hassle of a complicated do-everything-but-what-you-want cart. Actually, maybe all you need is a payment page; or a product database, a product search and display page with links to a cart like Paypal or Google payments.

Roads That Lead to a Custom Shopping Cart

Rule Number 1
A simple solution that you control, understand and can evolve is much better than trying to shoe-horn ideas into a complex expensive web cart solution that never does what you really want.

• Have you tried many shopping carts at considerable expense (like oscommerce, zen-cart, cubecart) but they are either too simple or too complex or do not do what you want.
• Have you gotten a $15,000 quote from a company that will create your site, not let you see the program code, charge you a big hosting fee and $150/hour to make changes later! What are the chances such a solution will fit your needs?
• Consider some things that non-custom commercial products simply cannot cater to: Generation of serial numbers and keys, credit points for previous purchases or services rendered, custom integration with point of sales systems, handling of special product types or services, custom discounting or price schemes, selling of only one product, service billing, rebates, gift certificates, charging to multiple credit cards, complex cross selling, product list upload.
• Writers of commercial web products put their efforts into generalizing the shopping cart software so it will work for as many clients as possible. The resulting monstrosity is the opposite of what you want, namely, a custom solution that does only what you want and does it well.
• Web authoring companies often offer a "Starter Package" to create your e-commerce website. However doing this often involves little more than clicking a link at your ISP control panel to install a CMS (content management system) that is complicated to learn, inserts one more layer of things to go wrong or obsolete and limits the way you can connect shopping carts.

The answer is a custom solution, written from scratch. It is the only way to get what you want and have the flexibility you need. The secret is to just start simple and let the site evolve over a period of years. Don't worry, the needs will become evident (a visitor information database, administration section, manual and automatic user login, email manager, etc.), with a custom solution you can just dive in and do it because anything is possible and any change can be managed. Maybe all you really need is a way to administer an online product database, a search engine that visitors use and a display page that creates links to an online cart like paypal or google payments.

The Server Rule Number 2 Run on an ISP using Linux as long as possible, then graduate to an on-site server Start an online web enterprise on our recommended ISP Linux servers for as little at $10 per month. I'll can help you to learn to use a Linux server running the MySQL database system and the PHP programming language. ISPs now offer packages with incredible features and software add-ons at no extra cost. This is unquestionably the best approach, forget about Microsoft Windows for web applications (way too expensive). Later when business grows slowly transition to a dedicated LAMP ecommerce server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). A Linux server is the size of a toaster and can reside anywhere a DSL or Cable line can be routed. It can handle hundreds of simultaneous users. Many of them can plug into your Windows or Mac networks and automatically configure themselves to talk to all the other machines.

Consider some of the advantages of a custom solution:

Rule Number 3
If you want yourbusiness.com to capture the real power of the internet, then accept that you need to be the manager of a constantly growing web software and design project.

The traditional approach of planning every detail and having a developer create your complete site is an oxymoron in my opinion. How can you possibly predict where yourwebsite.com will go let alone convey it to them? There are just too many possibilities of how it will either fit into your business, supplant it, extend it or even obsolete it. Only this type of custom solution will keep up with your imagination.com.

• An 'ongoing-development' model is dramatically less expensive and more likely to get what you want than the 'charge-a-big-fee' and then 'charge-a-huge-hourly-rate-to-make-changes' model.
• I'll show you how the site is built and will help you transition to managing development and design with your own staff over time
• The custom shopping cart (and subsequent additions) will be vastly simpler than commercial products
• The LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server is far superior to Windows in terms of reliability and cost
• All program code is PHP, the most popular, well understood and best documented language on the internet
• Site database backup is simple
• The web site is fast and very reliable
• There is no limit to the ways in which things can be customized, integrated, streamlined
• A custom web site can be parachuted into your business and demand few changes in the beginning, later it can be integrated or it can be kept as a separate entity for later sale or retention after business sale
• There is no limit to the kinds of online web resources that can be exploited to build, promote, leverage or complement your custom shopping web site
• We can build CRM tools (customer resource management) into the site and shopping cart
• Digitalfire has been doing this since 1995, the year the web was born
• We are dreamers like you, not stuffy business types that talk the language of market studies and business plans that just do not fly on the internet. The internet is about gut feelings, dreams, if you believe it we'll help you make it happen.

Design a Remotely Managed Site

Rule Number 4
Create YourWholeBusinessLife.com and administer it from anywhere in the world from any computer.

This issue is a lot bigger than just a custom shopping cart. How are your customer database and relations, information assets, billing, business history, intellectual assets maintained now? Put them all on a secure web server. Period. Get started now and soon you will managing over the web from abroad.

Any ecommerce site needs to have separate public and administration web interfaces with varying levels of access. Your staff needs to manage the orders that the shopping cart generates but you need to manage them and be building the ecommerce site and its shopping cart constantly. It can all be done on the web.

Evolution, Not Revolution

Rule Number 5
Create YourWebStore.com one step at a time.

Do not get trapped into having a company custom-write a complete site and then hand it over when done, this is guaranteed not to be what you really want. But they still want their $20,000 plus they want $200 an hour to fix it! However when site creation is divided into distinct stages (mini-contracts) that produce a progressively more functional site, you have better control. More important, the functioning site itself will establish the direction for succeeding stages (in spite of what you might think they should be). Also, consider this: each step of building a custom site involves new ideas that require back tracking to adjust steps already done. The farther along you get the more back tracking is necessary. Near the end of the project there are always many loose ends and details to settle (to tie together all the stages and react to the experience of running it the first few weeks or months). The effort required at this final stage might involve 30% of the total effort, but what if you have already paid them 95% of the money? It makes economic sense for them to walk away! So in the end it is all about trust, you need to work with a developer that can build it with you, that you can communicate with.

What if you already have a cart but it is not doing what you want and you need a custom solution? The same rules apply. Find a way for them to write a new cart that behaves like the old cart to legacy pages that call it to add/remove items. Then add new features to the cart and then new store and admin pages to exploit the features. In this way the site is running during development and you can pay a step at a time. A software company's ability to do this is a true test of its competence and it forces them to understand the way the site currently operates.

The Price

Rule Number 6
The internet has brought an unprecedented lack of correspondence between price and suitability.

It is possible to pay ten times less and yet get more. That is a fact in the internet shopping world today. The game that the computer world plays is complexity and locked in dependency, that makes money. Micro$oft excels at this game and the vast majority of computer support people are trapped in this matrix (and they love it). I do not play this game. Let's talk Linux, MySQL and PHP for your custom shopping cart and eCommerce site (to email see below).

Example Custom Shopping Cart

• it does crediting by recognizing validity and ownership of older serial numbers and based on country
• it can handle arbitrary preset credits or discounts
• it handles later reentry
• it has pop-up dialogs that signal the main page to recalculate when they close
• it offers ways of payment that other shopping carts cannot support
• it displays an invoice at any step
• it enables the visitor to email at any step
• multiple steps are carried out on the same page
• only one product is offered
• it enables the customer to view an invoice at any future date
• it generates proprietary serial numbers and provides them based on type of payment selected
• it ties into a very comprehensive people and sales administration system
• it combines an information and store page into one

Who is Digitalfire?

Digitalfire.com is a 25 year old software and internet development and design company obsessed with detail and quality and learning. Actually, it is me, Tony Hansen. My products are used on Linux, Windows and Macintosh and sold in 50 countries and taught in hundreds of universities. I have created web hosted applications like search engines, web stores, database sites, etc. (and can create world class sites like Amazon and Ebay). I write eCommerce software to subsidize other web projects. Contact me, Tony Hansen, using the form provided here.

Only custom-written web components can go down any road you choose!

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