Setting up a new company

[ChillDot]

Hi guys, i am currently in the process of setting up a clothing company and hence wanting an e-commerce website.

This is just for a hobby as I have recently graduated from uni with a computing systems degree so i am fairly competent in coding although have never coded an e-commerce site with products and shopping cart yet.

The company I currently work for use WordPress for their site and hence shopping cart although I find it slightly awkward to manually change the theme pages. (I am used to using Visual studio with ASP.NET and C#).

Is wordpress a good place to start for my first e-commerce site and is it worth sticking to and learning how to use properly or would you recommend using something along the lines of BigCartel?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks

[Test-ok]

Hi guys, i am currently in the process of setting up a clothing company and hence wanting an e-commerce website.

This is just for a hobby as I have recently graduated from uni with a computing systems degree so i am fairly competent in coding although have never coded an e-commerce site with products and shopping cart yet.

The company I currently work for use WordPress for their site and hence shopping cart although I find it slightly awkward to manually change the theme pages. (I am used to using Visual studio with ASP.NET and C#).

Is wordpress a good place to start for my first e-commerce site and is it worth sticking to and learning how to use properly or would you recommend using something along the lines of BigCartel?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks

Ya know now a days that skill isn't needed as far as setting up a site with a shopping cart, most are a download, set up and go...it's more about adding information than coding. Sounds like you might want to build your own. You can use the wordpress site depending if you want to keep it as is and just link to your store in the sub directory, unless you wanted to build your own..other wise it's plug an play. And as long as it's not your site I'd recommend the plug and play.

Build one to play with...on your dime. Save the responsibility you'd be putting on your self...unless their asking and willing to pay off some of the education you just got.

[ChillDot]

Ah sorry, I don't know if i worded that incorrectly, I am currently working for a company who use WordPress and was wondering if that was a good method for setting up my own separate website (nothing to do with who i am currently working for).

I am currently designing the site and looking for potential options for the building of it.

Part of the reason I want to do as much of the website myself is for a personal learning curve so that I can become better at what I do and hence improve the services I offer. Although if the majority of companies now use plug in and go methods is it worth my time learning?

The two main options I am considering at the moment are using an Open Source shopping cart and including it into my site or whether to use WordPress and their plug-ins.

Would it be worth customising one of the open source options tailored to my own site?

Thanks for taking the time to help

[NathanielB]

I have played with a couple of plugins for wordpress to turn it into an e-commerce site and I would never recommend using it as a live shop to anyone! IMHO its not very good at all, your much better of picking a system that's been built for all the tasks needed with an ecom store rather then trying to get plugins to work on a blog.

So I would have to say no, don't use wordpress as your store because that's not what it was designed to be used for and you will find much better options with proper ecom CMS!

I have used zencart and a couple of others in the past so if you just want a plug and play option your best bet is to have a google for the top 10 ecom CMS or something and see which you get on with best, but if you want to build your own...

The majority of people (that's people not companies) tend to want to use something that's plug and play, simple to install and get started, but companies on the other hand are quite often interested in custom themes and so on.

Still either way you look at it you can either learn to customise current CMS or build your own CMS to offer to people, its up to you, but you will find its a lot of work to build and maintain your own ecom CMS because people will have custom needs meaning you might be forever changing it for different people.

For example, I run a number of my own sites, so rather then looking for custom solutions I simply learnt how to customise wordpress and zencart to suite my personal needs because its a lot faster and easier to do that rather then build something for myself from scratch.

Also, you might have noticed that there are already far to many small custom CMS to look at these days, so you might find it hard to market a new ecom CMS unless you have some really cool features to offer that will put you above the rest.

I guess it all depends where you want to go with it all once you have opened your learning curve?

[ChillDot]

Thanks a lot for reply. I did read it just have not has a chance to start the development of the website yet due to other commitments.

I have heard good things about zen cart and so think I will give that one a try for now, one question I have though is would I be able to integrate a blog within the website aswell?

As its a brand we are setting up we want a store as well as static pages and also a blog, would this be feasible with Zen Cart?

Thanks for the help, will be sending rep your way when the forums gives me power

[NathanielB]

Thanks a lot for reply. I did read it just have not has a chance to start the development of the website yet due to other commitments.

I have heard good things about zen cart and so think I will give that one a try for now, one question I have though is would I be able to integrate a blog within the website aswell?

As its a brand we are setting up we want a store as well as static pages and also a blog, would this be feasible with Zen Cart?

Thanks for the help, will be sending rep your way when the forums gives me power

I believe you can get blog plugins for zen cart such as wordpress, but I'm not sure. For my gothic clothing site I simple added some code from wordpress to my zen cart home page to display blog posts and then re-created the same theme for zen and WP so they look the same.

For example, you could simple add a link to domain.com/blog in your header, sidebar or what ever to link to you blog and make the same theme for them both.

For displaying blog posts from WP on zen I just added an include in the corresponding page in my zen install folder. For example you might place an php include line in index.php or what ever the file is zen uses (not sure of the top of my head).

[Alt-team]

Hello ChillDot!

If you plan to have a serious business, avoid wordpress. wordpress may be good for a hobby-like business that is not supposed to bring you a real income.

Choose a shopping cart platform that is specially developed for e-commerce and includes all main features - unlimited number of products, seo urls, promotion tools, automatic inventory control, etc.

<snip>self promotional content removed!</snip>