eCommerce shouldn’t be hard, nor should it be expensive. So, what does it really take to setup an online retail shop?
Being the IT Geek that I am, lets start with some requirements (starting with the obvious):
- You need to be able to find something to buy
- Once you find it you need to be able to buy it
- I want the money in my paypal account
- I want to ship with those neat flat rate boxes (And I KNOW how big a 65 pound piece of luggage is, so under 70 pounds should be easy)
- I need to be able to update how much I have to sell, and not sell stuff I don’t have
- I should be able to make it look the way I want
- And it should run on my existing website
- And I don’t really want to have to pay anything for it!
OK, so my bluehost account has a few “shopping cart” programs that you can install. Both Amazon and eBay have store fronts you can buy. And paypal has a pretty easy API.
I’ve looked at a few before and OpenCart seems pretty straight forward, so we might as well start with that one….
The installation went pretty smooth and in about one afternoon I had it working and integrated into a PayPal test account — sweet. Took another day for the post office to enable my account there, so now it does real-time pricing on the shipping (or it would if the shipping module worked right.)
Now to dig into the underlying code and see if I can make it dance!