New to E-Commerce

[NPassero]

Alright, one of my friends wants me to develop a website for him and he needs the whole e-commerce system in it. Shopping card, payment options and everything.
My questions..

Where do I start ? :confused:

Should I code my own ?

Or just download some E-Commerce Shopping Cart Script...

[visualAd]

That depends, how much time do you have? How confident are you coding it yourself? What features does your client need? How much are you being paid? ;)

[NPassero]

That depends, how much time do you have? How confident are you coding it yourself? What features does your client need? How much are you being paid? ;)

Time is not determined yet, but is a lot of time. No Rush.
Confidence... Ok... not sure of everything that needs to go into it ( Merchant Tools ? Credit cards and such )
Payment.. Enough :)

The whole merchant tools ( i was checking into ) is pretty much up to the client and kind of looks like it is easy to set up, just pay for the service and then they provide some sort of help for it.

Creating my own, would I only be able to go through something like google checkout, paypal, or some other payment type.. Wouldn't know where to start with processing Credit Cards. hah.

I am probably going to code the whole inventory system, adding, removing, in stock / out of stock, alerts for low inventory, stuff like that.

[I_Love_My_Vans]

www.hotscripts.com have alot of good and free ecommerce systems, might be an idea to look over there to see how it all works.

[NPassero]

I was actually starting to look at osCommerce, which is open source and allows a lot of different features. The only thing is that I can't test how things would work with market tools such as paypal, authorize.net, 2checkout.com

[dclamp]

find a online store that uses it, and then buy something :p. jk...


How most of them work is, that you are shopping on your site, then when you go to pay for the stuff, you are redirected to a pay site (like paypal) and you can customize your paypal page to look very similar to you site, and when the transaction is done, paypal will redirect back to a "Thank You" (or other) page on your site.

here is some demos on PayPal's site: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_merchant-outside