Need eCommerce Question and Honest Feedback

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I have the reviews and installation information and everything there is to read about the eCommerce block and I'm not quite sure what to think here and I need some advice. While I can make Concrete5 work, I'm not a full time web developer. I'm a structural engineer with a knack for being able to hack computer code and make things work out. My php skills are not all that good. I can look at what others have written and understand what is going on and hack may way through things to get what I want, but there is no was on God's green earth that I can sit down and write php code of my own.

I built a website with Concrete5 for a club that I belong to and it has gotten the attention of a few people who own a retail store in the business the club is in. They have asked me to build an eCommerce store for their Brick and Mortar store and the eCommerce block integration would be very good. They want a store and then they want to write articles about various things and then at the end of the article feature items from their store that you can buy, as well as related items.

It seems like Concrete5 and the eCommerce block are the thing to use for this except the reviews say the eCommerce block works fair at best. This would end up being a fairly large store - probably a few hundred items. Would the eCommerce block handle this or should I start learning how to use zen cart or magneto for this? Remember, my php skills aren't all that good.

I've read about all kinds of problems with the eCommerce block that scare me off a little, but I had some reasonable assurance that the problems have been fixed I'm probably going to use the C5 solution.

Thanks for your input...whatever I decide here is hopefully going to be the long term solution.

Here is a lot of what I've been reading:http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/ecommerce/reviews/...

sogren
 
r1digital replied on at Permalink Reply
r1digital
Hi Sogren.

It's true the eCommerce block for C5 isn't the best solution out there but it's pretty good.

All eCommerce solutions have their bugs even Zen Cart and Magento. I'd say have a go with C5 i'm sure you'll be amazed and if it isn't what you want have a look at CS-Cart, It's not free but it very powerful.
jordanlev replied on at Permalink Reply
jordanlev
The C5 eCommerce addon is great as long as what you want to do falls within the features it provides. The things that will make it difficult are if the store has complex business rules (discounts under certain conditions, different prices for different people, tying into a user system, restricting orders of certain items for certain reasons, etc.), or if things need to look a very specific way.

Unfortunately there's no demo to try it out so there's not really any way to know ahead of time if it will meet your needs or not.

If you want to look into alternative solutions, I would check out Shopify, which is a monthly service you pay for but it is intended to be set up by people who aren't coders. You can always set up a C5 site for the content and a separate site for the store, and just provide links to the store from the content (as long as it's okay that the two sites don't look exactly the same).

If you don't want to delve into code, stay far away from Magento -- it is a nightmare, even for someone who does know code. I don't have any personal experience with Zen Cart, but you might also look into Open Cart, which is free/open source, and a bit easier to deal with than some of the other systems.
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
Thanks Jordan...

There is a demo however. That's one of the little black icons on the
listing's landing page.
http://ecommerce.concrete5.org/...


best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz
Adreco replied on at Permalink Reply
Adreco
An obvious learning curve if your someone (like me) that doesn't have much experience in e-commerce sites.
That being said: One of my clients has just added it live to their site within the last 2 days. Due some time restrictions... I needed to drop in product items for him and I quickly realized:
The ability to seamlessly drop in an e-commerce product block(s) anywhere in your site is REALLY helpful... allowing us to add and remove daily specials anywhere with minimal effort. Very easy to replicate/reproduce the same results after the first time.
My biggest challenge coming up is learning more about integrating with his banks merchant services. For the time being, we're using the integrated PayPal payment service (no set up cost) until confident everything is the way we need it to be functionally. Then we'll tackle other payment options.

(by the way, we're currently using it for about forty product items and I'm confident there will be no problems with managing a few hundred items. Biggest Potential problem I can see is keeping on top of updating available inventory if item is available both on-line and on the sales floor)