eCommerence - Using a CMS or Develop bespoke?

[Bakedgoods]

I'm thinking of setting up a onlien business but I have a few questions first..

Have any of you used some sort of eCommerece website store solution for this? Or used a CMS/Blog combined with some other software to build a catalogue and sell products via your website?

I can code in ASP.net however my knowledge really isn't that great and I have no experience with taking credit card payments online so i'm wondering if buying a solution like above is a relatively sound idea.

 

[MMD]

Security is obviously paramount - so that's something to keep in mind, especially if you aren't confident of locking down your self created pages.

For as what to use, ecom package or a cms/blog - I really think it depends on the number of products you're selling and how often they are changed, updated, removed etc.

I was going to start selling 3-4 items from a website and was simply going to build my own catalogue and then implement a payment gateway of some sort. That way I could cut out all the bloat of a full blown ecommerce package.

 

[Bakedgoods]

Functionality wise I think I could develop everything, but i'm just not sure how to handle the cart and payment stuff.

I've just never had to think about securing a website (obviously i've done membership stuff) so i'm not massively confident, although it would be a good learning curve.

I'm just interested in seeing if anyone has bought a solution for a similar sort of thing?

 

[MMD]

Paypal do a resource kit for getting up and running with their payment gateway I think.

 

[Bakedgoods]

http://www.volusion.co.uk

Looks very good, obviously expensive

 

[s-p]

Have you taken a look at http://www.magentocommerce.com/ before?

 

[Shoseki]

You are setting up the business : it will be very hard to do all the web development and business development alone. Therefore farm pieces out!

Can do the design, but not the CMS? Farm it out!
Can do the CMS, but not the shopping cart extension etc? Farm it out?

etc etc

 

[philjohn]

I would use an external company with eCommerce experience (a service like shopify may be good for you as it's hosted and handles the payment side of things).

When I developed an eCommerce solution (that's used on quite a few big sites) it took around 5-6 years of work to get to where it is now - eCommerce looks easy at first but there are lots of "gotchas".

As for taking payments, farm this out to an external provider, someone like paypal if you're just starting up, or protx if you can get a merchant account with a bank.

 

[Bakedgoods]

Cheers for the advice guys