Online Shops

Ciphon

Ciphon

Ciphon

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Hello All,

I'm thinking about setting up an online shop, and instead of purchasing software from somewhere, I would really rather build it myself as a project.

Has anyone done this before themselves, or have any expierance with this?

I would be using ASP.net with C#.

Will I need any thing else - Idealy I would like to avoid PayPal, and I'd like it to be able to take Credit / Debt card payments in real time.

I'm guessing I'll need some kind of certificate saying I'm legit - maybe not seeming as their are so many scammer's out there!

Any info would be great!

Cheers
 
I've built an online shop in C# .NET 3.5 (love LINQ!), on an MSSQL backend. Wasn't too complicated, though best advice I can give is make sure you scope out the project properly before you start. What do you need to accomplish in terms of: products, categories, subcategories, product imagery, attributes, variants (eg. colour), and offers (eg. linked/related products, buy one get one free, X for the price of Y, promo codes, loyalty discounts, etc). Also, do you need to allow for customer feedback? Do you require an administration page where all the above can be edited easily or by a non-technical user?

You might not (and probably won't) need all of those features, but it's a hell of a lot harder to add some of those in later than it is to at least consider (if not implement) them at the start. I've recently had to add multi-buy offers to the shop I built, which required quite a bit of database fiddling as they hadn't been included in the original design!

I can't help much with the payment side of things, as my company uses an in-house solution rather than PayPal, Google Checkout, or any of the merchant providers you could sign up to. How you process payments will depend largely, I would think, on what and how much you are selling, and whether you're a private individual or a company... but someone else might be able to provide more info on payment processing :)

Good luck!
 
Hmm, certainly have given me a lot to think about!

I think I will be needing categories, sub-categories, product images, and attributes.

I think Google Checkout may be the best option for taking payments - however I have read that they don't pay to an individuals account. This could limit the amount of people who would be able to buy things to those who have google mail accounts though.

This is going to be a very small shop on a personal website. Just wanted to challenge myself to do it!

It isn't anything I want to quit my job over, just maybe a very small income boost that I can run in my spare time!
 
I'm sure it's fairly obvious to you, but if you're going to be sending sensitive information, such as billing data, you're going to need to be doing this through a SSL. Now you can self sign, but due to the browser/SSL provider racketeering (i jest... kinda), nobody will want to buy anything from a self signed store. If you wish to get a SSL from a trusted provider with a good reputation, I would send you to thawte. On the other hand, commodo is a much cheaper alternative.

If you want to store credit card informaion you're going to need PCI compliance. If you're a bit muddy on the details, you can use a partner like datacache to process your payments. I'm not that clued up on the the requirments here, but hopefully this is a nudge in the right direction.
 
Do you already have https available? If not that's another thing to look into, I won't put card details into a none https site as one of the most basic security checks when buying anything and the hosting company I have 2 sites with want a fortune for the ability to enable https, luckily I don't need it!
 
These are all very good point's, and things that I have certainly never thought of! As mentioned, I have never done anything like this before!

The very fact that I'm looking to spend as little as possible, make me think that google checkout and paypal are the only ways for me to go!
 
Ciphon said:
These are all very good point's, and things that I have certainly never thought of! As mentioned, I have never done anything like this before!

The very fact that I'm looking to spend as little as possible, make me think that google checkout and paypal are the only ways for me to go!
Click to expand...

For paypal you could express payments - where the customer would pay eBay style (add stuff to basket on your site, checkout using paypal site and retiurn to your site once payment is approved). It's a good one for learning as they have a sandbox site you can use for testing.
 
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