CMS/E-Commerce Choices

gord · 22 Jan 2009 at 09:30

Hello all,

Im just canvassing opinion on the current offerings of CMS with E-Commerce. I am looking for a professional solution. My main needs are:

Customer login/sign up.

A shop with easily manageable limited stock in various categories. This may have to be customised because I ultimately want it so that when you buy a product it takes one off the stock, but they can cancel up until a certain date. Payment processing on-site would be preferable.

Product search.

A news system.

Customisable navigation/appearance. CSS controlled templates etc is fine.

I have heard of things like Wordpress and Joomla and been advised on something called DotNetNuke. But it has been quite some time since I played with Wordpress and Joomla.

It should also be SEO optimised.

Any thoughts/help is much appreciated.

gord · 26 Jan 2009 at 09:46

Right, does anyone know where I can get more info on this? Maybe another forum more suited to this type of thing?

Cheers.

philjohn · 26 Jan 2009 at 10:22

Your best bet is to find a company that specialises in this kind of thing, e-commerce looks quite simple but can get very tricky very quickly.

The other option is to sign up to one of those pre-made shop websites (something like Shopify) and work around any limitations that these "one size fits all" solutions bring.

3dcandy · 26 Jan 2009 at 11:06

the usual suspects are :

Shop based with extras
Zen
OSCommerce
Magento

I suppose you could use wordpress, 2.7 is out and is quite different from earlier versions, automatic plugin and themes installation

CMS Made Simple - though the templates are ***** and needs a lot of work via plugins
to get the shop side

joomla
dotnetnuke needs asp, so a windows host
drupal

My take would to look at Magento.

A forum you may want to frequent is

Digital point - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

gord · 26 Jan 2009 at 13:04

I am noticing that the integration of CMS and E-commerce isnt as prevalent as I thought it would be. But I will keep looking. Cheers for the pointers!

I did find this though, http://blog.webdistortion.com/2008/05/17/13-free-cms-options-for-web-design-professionals/

That has been quite useful.

3dcandy · 26 Jan 2009 at 13:11

I actually like CMS Made Simple, but that doesn't mean that I'd necessarily recommend it as in my previous post. There are shopping cart modules however, and the learning curve is quite easy

As regards the integration, I know Zen Cart has a decent newsletter system, and you can make your own pages, but as a CMS it's limited.

Wordpress has great themes and plugins, lots of support, but don't know how the shop side would function!