I’m a front-end web developer/designer for a retail company. I work with programmers in an ASP.NET environment. I know HTML and CSS, I’m fair-to-middling with JS and jQuery. I do the occasional freelance website on the side-- typically informational sites that don’t need much more functionality than a little JS, or Wordpress customizations.
I got a call from someone who owns a tire company, and does not currently have a website. He’s not sure what exactly he wants. He thinks he wants an ecommerce site at some point but doesn’t think he’s quite ready to deal with all the attendant issues of selling online and shipping just yet. He gave me a couple examples of competitor sites he likes: site #1 sells online, site #2 gives the opportunity to choose tires you want online, but ends at a form you submit to make an appt. to come in to have the tires purchased and installed at the store.
I suggested we could do a site similar to his example site #2. But even though it stops short of being an ecommerce site, it would need to have most of the functionality of an ecommerce site- ability to filter tires by brand or vehicle, the ability for the client to login to add/modify/delete products, etc. So I’m looking at a packaged ecommerce solution- something that would give the ability to upgrade to an actual ecommerce site in the future. I haven’t talked website budget with the guy yet, but I assume it’s not enormous.
I wanted to get input on what you guys thought would be the best solution. His example site #1, the ecommerce site, uses Magento. I looked into Magento and see that they offer a free open-source version of their ecommerce engine, but I’ve read that the learning curve for Magento is so steep it’s best left to dedicated Magento developers. So now I’m looking at Shopify-- they seem to have pretty reasonable monthly rates to host the site and provide their ecommerce engine.
So, questions: Anybody use Shopify? Is the customer support good? Is the learning curve reasonable for someone with my skills? Is it highly customizable? Are there any hidden fees other than the monthly cost (besides things like credit card processing and SSL cert, which he won’t need now)? Also, am I giving up on the free Magento solution too quickly? Are there any other ecommerce sites you’d recommend over Shopify or Magento?
What you describe can’t be done in a trivial manner because it involves user logins with access to a database. This is very different than providing an informational website about the products and services. You are going to have to cost this thing out to be much more expensive.
I recommend using a very good CMS to do this. But the thing is, a good CMS is going to require a time investment to learn how to use it.
What I recommend is for you to find someone experienced in doing this already and take a percentage of the project to management it for the client. This way, you will have a successful website and you can learn how this is done along the way. Then decide if you think you can do this yourself or hire an expert again. What is good about hiring an expert is that it makes you available to get other work.
What you describe would be fairly trivial for a decent developer using asp.net and a SQL backend, with logins to update the database handled by asp.net membership and roles, leaving you to manage the UI with your HTML/CSS/jQuery skills.
In fact I’d be tempted to offer to work with you on that if I wasn’t busy already… don’t suppose it’ll wait until about Feb next year will it?
Thanks for the replies so far. I do know a programmer I’ve worked with a couple times, but as I said I don’t think this potential client’s budget is that large, and it doesn’t seem like his website needs require building something from scratch.
I would think that a hosted solution such as Shopify would at a minimum offer some type of CMS interface for making changes to products and other aspects of the site, and methods for filtering the products by different methods, wouldn’t it?
You could make the proposal to the client to be in two phases. One is a basic website which includes a Contact Form. The second phase will include e-commence elements such as a shopping cart, database, user logins, etc. But the goal of phase one should be to provide information about the business and generate inquiries and sales leads. This is not only helpful to the business, but it is helpful to you, because after they see how useful the website is in phase one, they can better justify spending the money to do phase two.
A CMS is the way to go for this, but get help to do, because too many of the user groups out there are so gung-ho about their own CMS, they expect you to dedicate your life to learning every aspect of it. Nothing wrong with that, if that’s going to be your role in this, but if it isn’t, as I mentioned get help.
There are a lot of ecommerce platforms and website builders. When I was looking for a website builder, I was suggested to compare different platforms on https://ecommercebuilders.blogspot.com. It turned out to be very useful as I had a possibility to see the pros and cons of the most popular of them. Finally, I chose Shopify. It supports multiple languages and has a mobile compitability (which is very important nowadays). It also provides you a huge range of apps or add-on features which you can integrate and include in your ecommerce site. Though Shopify is not cheap, I like it.
