Shopping for Shopping

Spelunker

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 17, 2005
11,884
So, my company is looking to set up an online storefront to sell a couple of physical products as a bit of a pilot program (we're essentially a travel/education company, and this would be outside of normal operations). Generally speaking, my first inclination would be to go the Shopify direction as we don't really want to commit much in the way of development resources to this anytime soon. I'd like to explore a few more options, if only as due diligence. As I haven't worked in this space before, and there doesn't seem to be a topic that SOSH isn't collectively an expert in, I thought I'd toss it out there. 
 
A couple thoughts on requirements:
 
  • UI: we'd certainly like the ability to skin/theme the site a bit.
  • Localization: Multiple languages / multiple currencies are a nice to have for the future, but certainly not a necessity now
  • Payments: credit card processing should be included (that is, we wouldn't want the user to have to use PayPal or anything like that). At this time we *don't* want to incorporate any payments/orders with the account balance the customer has with us.
  • Fulfillment: we have our own distribution center, so we'd need to be able to get order information to them in some way (even if it were something as crufty as an email).
  • Shipping: we'd want to tie this to our FedEx account, and expose our rates. We'd some way to give the user / us the shipping/tracking information.
  • Support: we have a call center, and a few reps will be tasked with handling any calls that come in. They'll need to be able to support the calls, though (even if it's just being able to see what orders happened).
 
 
Keeping in mind that this still falls into the category of 'experiment', is there anyone that I should be checking out? Or any useful parameters that I haven't included?
 
Thanks!
 
 

Spelunker

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 17, 2005
11,884
Good link Hambone, thanks. That's another thing I should toss in: it should be pretty turn-key, so something like WooCommerce (which apparently is the most-used tool) would be out, as we won't implement a Wordpress site for this. 
 
It basically also has to be self-hosted.
 

Boston CyberSox

Member
SoSH Member
Magento is very popular commerce platform and they offer a product called Magento Go, which is a turn-key storefront hosted by Magento. I've not used it personally, but it seems to hit a lot of your desired features.

http://go.magento.com

That said, while they support multiple payment gateways, believe you'd have to provide your own merchant account for the credit card processing.
 

Hambone

will post for drinks
SoSH Member
Jul 15, 2005
2,822
Link above is an article about magento pulling support for their entry level products next year.