Need all in one ecommerce site solution

[seolman]

Originally Posted by vangogh

Dave I'm currently working on a Drupal site with Ubercart as well. Will be awhile before it's all set though since this client has other things more pressing. I'll be curious what you find out about Magento. I had seen a few recommendations for it, but don't know much about it from experience.

I'll let you know what we find out. I'm always up for friendly collaboration when it makes sense. I set up a play Drupal with the Ubercart and it seems to work fairly well but I talked the client out of a couple awkward bits of special functionality they wanted. Would've been very costly to chop up the code so severely.

My programming guys are building the real McCoy right now - when it's done I'll pass you a link to play around with it.

[vangogh]

I have both installed, but we're still working on configuring things and both my client and myself are first learning how Drupal works. This site has until now only been a wholesale site so it hasn't been taking orders through the site. My client recently purchased it. It had been one of her suppliers. We're looking into setting it up to be both a retail and wholesale site and set up roles and permissions so wholesalers will be able to login and see different things than others.

[billbenson]

So, for the designers here; if you were starting a shopping cart site from scratch tomorrow, what would you use? PHP por favor. By site, I mean cart plus other regular site stuff: blogs, information pages, old twiggy photos, etc.

[seolman]

For a tried and tested solution I would use Drupal with the Ubercart plug in.

[vangogh]

I'd use php, because it's the language I know. In truth I would grab an open source solution like Drupal or WordPress and customize them instead of starting from scratch most likely. No reason to reinvent the wheel.

[billbenson]

When I made the post, I was curious about the Drupal with the Ubercart solution.

Does Wordpress have any kind of shopping cart plug in?

I'm not doing design for other people, I want to standardize on one platform. I don't do design for other people, so I don't need to know every program out there. As you know, I'm playing with wordpress at the moment. I also know oscommerce and have some oscommerce sites (don't like oscommerce, so I'm conberting that site to Zen because the database structure is similar).

Setting that aside, for new sites, keeping with the kiss principal, I'd like to have one platform that I use. I could continue with a wordpress / zen cart approach (again, is there a cart plugin for wp?). I could look at Seolmans recommendation.

If I build a new site, I'd like to upload the combo platform - say Drupal with the Ubercart plug in, WP. Change some images and colors in the css and I'm up and running. I have a standard platform with a cms, blog, and cart?

[orion_joel]

I also took a look at Magento, when i was trying to find a cart solution to use on my business website. I also found it to be a little buggy, and there was many things that i could not figure out on it. Also i had some trouble trying to make it accept csv data uploads.

I end up settling on the combination of Joomla and Virtuemart. Which they have integrated really well into a single install. I should imagine that blogging would not be to difficult to include in the setup as well. either by default or with a plugin. I had been using joomla on a couple of sites, and when i found it with virtuemart and saw how well it worked together was my choice option.

[vangogh]

Bill, WordPress has some shopping cart plugins. I haven't had need to use any so I can't offer opinions based on experience using them. If you search 'wordpress shopping carts' you'll find plenty of info. I think you'll find some free and some pay cart plugins with varying features. As you understand how WordPress works you'll probably be able to take an existing cart plugin and customize it to your needs.