concrete5 has won a lot of fans with our unique approach to problem solving. We have always reminded ourselves that while developers make sites, owners have to live with them. Great websites are really due to that relationship work more than any specific feature. How do you balance elegance with power?
When our community asked for an eCommerce solution, we spent a lot of time looking at what was already out there. What we found was that everything basically solved the problem with the same assumptions. Almost without exception, every solution assumes a category type view and a page detail type view. That's okay, it makes a lot of sense if you've got millions of products to sell, but it didn't feel very elegant or flexible to us.
When you're starting a brick and mortar store, you probably don't start thinking about the aisles. You think about products. What am I going to sell? How can I price, group, and display it in ways that make sense for my customers? You probably have a wide array of display tools, from glass counters to revolving racks, at your disposal to best show off your wares. That's what we worried about with our eCommerce solution. How do you build a really nice boutique, design centric store online? There's enough solutions for Wal*Mart already.
Most of the people who love concrete5 are using it for medium sized sites, small businesses, budding entrepreneurs, etc. Their ideas and needs change from day to day. The need to quickly manage huge quantities of products is secondary to formatting, design, and flexibility.
We created a Product Block that you can put anywhere you want in the site. Yes, it can be associated with one default page, and it can even create that page for you, but you're not forced to use it. You can place the Product Block anywhere you like, and change all sorts of formatting options around it to create different experiences. Designers can dream up websites that present goods and services in any way they please, without having to battle with the tech guys to hide irrelevant category and search interfaces.
eCommerce for concrete5 is a flexible building platform designed to manage small design focused eCommerce sites. If you need to sell a thousand or less products and really care about how your eCommerce site looks, this is a great solution for you.
Our goal is to make eCommerce as great a platform for selling stuff as concrete5 is for managing content.
-Franz Maruna, CEO
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