Some recommendations for a small Ecommerce site

[seancss]

Hi firstly im new to this forum and can see myself spending alot of time here in the future, i'm relatively new to web design but have a college degree in computer programming,

Im looking to build myself a small online Shop, i've constructed one before using Joomla and virtuemart but I would think building one from scratch would suit this light weight site, ill have a main frontpage which links to a shop page that sells around four different items my question is can I just build the site in CSS and Html then after it is near completion add in the shopping cart or would it be advisable to integrate it as I go?, ill have two pages of different goods and upon selection of whichever item the shopping cart would keep track until they hit the checkout.


From reading this forum I see Oscommerce is a free shopping cart and people suggested using it,

Any idea's / advice would be good so I can divise a plan of action before I start.

 

[MarkR]

I would never discourage anyone from making something from scratch, especially since I do it all the time. But what I would say is have a look at what is available first, there is a lot to think about when creating bespoke e-commerce site. You have to be very sure it's secure, especially since you deal with money!

Anyway take a look at:

Prestashop
Opencart
Magento
zencart

OSCommerce is pretty old now and the community is dying a little bit. Most eshops you see being hacked these days are OSCommerce.

 

[seancss]

Great thanks Mark for prompt reply, the advice about Ocommerce is now taken aboard,

Regarding security is this allot to do with the integration process as myself as a noob can see it as copying already written modules for one of your mentioned carts or am I wrong in thinking this, my php is poor at best,

I've set up my Mac running Apache server, php myql etc so I can build it before buying SSL hosting.

What I'm having an issue with is the difficulty integrating the shopping card and now that you mention it the security, am i in over my head as I would love to design this site from scratch as I only have every built from a template, I have completely edited templates before but the shopping cart was always a plugin I installed.

Thanks.