[captainK]

Hi guys,

I'm going to be under taking my first e-commerce based project soon and I'm just after some advice as to where to start? I have experience of PHP with content management systems and the like.

Would you recommend coding from scratch or using one of the many pre-built shopping carts out there. I've been looking at zen cart. Anyone had any experience of it? Or can anyone recommend a different one?

The site is going to be quite unique I think so I can't be restricted to some standard e-shop template.

Cheers.

[datahound]

This months .NET magazine has an article on just this, not read it yet so cannot say how good it is.

OSCommerce is the much used OS system.
http://www.oscommerce.com/

Clover I looked into at one stage, uses PHP with flat files so quite portable.
http://www.clovershop.com/index_en.php

[mike_m]

We just launched a site using cubecart, and though it's not perfect, it is pretty customisable, and uses css for layout, so it's pretty easy to style.

[Rakan]

I just finished building a custom e-commerce system for a client. The client had sooo many specific ideas, I couldn't find anything out there that fits. Building a custom e-commerce site certainly gives you a great freedom, but it's a lot of work and is very demanding. I personally would rather take the longer route and give the client exactly what he needs, than spend ages customizing a ready-made system. One thing I learned from this project is that there are many things you need to take into consideration when building an e-commerce site. The client's business plan needs to be stable and fit into the context of what he's trying to accomplish from online sales. On the programming side of things, there's a lot of bits and pieces you have to plan out from the start, or you'll end up banging your head against the wall and have to go through previous code to correct errors in the logic. A book on building an e-commerce site may help to point these bits and pieces out. Good luck with everything! I hope I was of some help.