Online Store and Shopping Cart Questions

[tbradley]

Hello All,

I'm new to the forums so I hope this is the right forum to post this in, if not please let me know or feel free to move the thread.

Basically, I'm planning to open up an online store that sells computers and computer hardware. That being said I need to know a little bit about online stores + shopping carts and how they work. If anybody can help answer some of the questions below it would be greatly appreciated.

How do large retail websites manage their catalog of products and ensure that prices are kept up to date? Is this all just manual coding or is there an automated method?

What is the general method of putting a shopping cart onto a website? Is it all through 3rd party providers? I would like all major credit cards accepted and possibly the option to pay through amazon or paypal eventually.

Should I implement the shopping cart immediately or wait until I have a catalog of products to sell?

When developing the initial website what should I take into consideration about adding a shopping cart later? For example, if I want to build my website now but don't plan on selling products immediately how can I set up my site so that it's easy to add a catalog of products which will work with a shopping cart when the site becomes operational?

Finally, I know many web based retailers don't actually have their own warehourse but rather a list of warehouses with products in stock. How do you generally get in touch with wholesalers or vendor warehouses. Do you need to contact them all individually?

Anyways, those are my questions for the time being. As I said, any help at all is greatly appreciated.

 

[amorrisweb]

Many times for an ecommerce site, a lot of the warehouse and storage will need to be taken care of beforehand. Most ecommerce platforms (ie MivaMerchant, OSCommerce, etc.) provide tools within the interface for adding and organizing content (products and prices), typically grouping by category. OSCommerce might be a good place to start and play with the idea since it is free and open source so there isn't any risk to see what types of plug-ins and modules are available. With such a large open source community your are bound to find someone who has scripted something similar to the needs of your store and you can implement the plug-in on your own site. In short, look into your ecommerce solutions on google and really dive into the pros/cons, of each solution to determine what you need.

 

[Trevor]

Most retailers utilize drop shipping suppliers, EG. we just finished up a huge ecommerce site for cell phone and accessories. The owner of the site does not have a warehouse, all of his items are dropshipped by the supplier. We configured everything to be fully automated, using API feeds the items always stay current, so if the suppliers qty changes the site reflects that if they introduce a new product it gets added to the site. When orders come in the go straight to the supplier, and all payments are processed by authorize.net.

We will launch the site middle of next month and the site will have more than 5000 items listed and those items required no data entry. It works very well, but is not terribly easy to setup, in fact i cant set it up, that's what i have developers for.

This should give a good idea of what can be done and the process.