Why you shouldnt do your own e-Commerce

Ok, so you got a great new product or a new spin on a old one or provide services to your customers and want to sell those goods or services online.

There are numerous companies out there waiting to take your money for a shopping cart system or e-commerce type hosting but only a few will deliver the goods so to speak.

Theres Zen Cart, X-Cart, OS Commerce and CubeCart to name the big 4 all of these carts have their good points and bad points. of the 4 I love CubeCart for several reasons.

1. Its easy to skin or design the layout to fit what you want your online store to present to the world
2. Its easy on Site /store owners to learn to manage, maintain, edit and update your products, site documents and products.
3. Its extensible, meaning if you need a feature thats not part of the core CubeCart files you can have those new features written into the system. there are several excellent mod authors creating incredible tools and features for use with CubeCart
   
4. Its Flexible, You can use CubeCart for everything from selling tickets to laundry detergent or your bands MP3's

Depending on which system you choose to use as your means of selling on the web you will need someone to get you up to speed on what it means to you and your customers to sell online securely and safely. emphasis on securely...

Unless you are very familiar with HTML, CSS, Graphic Design, php and MySQl I do not recommend anyone selling online w/o first getting a Proficient web developer who KNOWS the shopping cart system you will be using.

Most of the systems brag you can download, install and begin selling this is a plain out lie...
Heres why...

Most of these systems at a minimum need a site owner who knows web technologies to set up the system properly and skin and work out your payment gateway, shipping product options etc.
Selling online is not for the weak, timid or the broke.

To sell successfully online will take a web developer working with you to teach you the ins and outs on Search engine optimization, Payment gateways, SSL certificates, shipping methods and other areas to ensure your customers have a trouble free enjoyable experience shopping on your site.

Those who choose to sell online w/o at least researching these areas and not getting a qualified designer to at least design a custom layout for the shopping cart system (templates can be purchased cheaply for most of the above systems but remember if you bought it someone else has too and the only thing distinguishing your site from theirs will be your logo or company name. templates are cheap for a reason... and usually are not full skins but rather stock skins that come with the system and only mildly modified) are looking to go out of business if not quickly then slowly and painfully. I have had too many of my clients complain they never knew what it really takes to do e-Commerce properly so that they and their customers are not frustrated or fighting with a imporperly set up system that isnt using a SSL certificate to encrypt the information being submitted to the site. Hosting companies will take your money and give you the tools but at what cost? some hosting companies like Host Gator and Blue host have so many users that anyone using a pHp MySql driven website will wait long times to only have their site page fail because the sql server is way over sold and trying to push data to too many users at once. Other places will try to make it easy on you to install the system from your Cpanel via Fantastico but as anyone knows fantastico is the last to know when there has been updates to the system or will cause problems on the install because the server isn't configured properly and installation is only one step to getting setup...

1. If you are going to sell online get a good shopping cart, research them all find the one you believe will serve you and your customers best.
2. Research what it takes to shop and to sell online successfully
3. and above all find a qualified web developer who knows the system you want to use (check each systems website for forums for people who know the system and will work with you to get you up to speed and level the playing field for your online store.

I hope this post helps anyone out there looking to sell online it can be fun, and lucrative if you DO IT RIGHT

Designing the Web - Where to start....

If you are a web developer or web designer or just a guy with a hobby site or a business owner doing your own site you need to know a few things about browser usage and display resolution. If you dont know what people are using when they are surfing the net you wont be able to effectively design websites that work in ALL the top browsers and wont be able to determine what WIDTH your site or your clients site should be. When people visit websites we keep their stats to help us understand the trends happening on our own sites. But their are sites out there with huge amounts of traffic that publish the BIG PICTURE. What internet users worldwide are using for a browser, their screen resolution, their IP and country of origin and much more.

Browser Stats
Sat Sep 1 00:01:01 2007 - Wed Oct 31 23:58:00 2007 61.0 Days
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/October/browser.php

Thecounter.com's statistics clearly show Microsoft with a 75% usage share which is now at 80% for the first part of November with their 2 browsers and TheCounter.com isn't geared to any one segment of the internet population so it should give us a much broader view of actual usage. IE6 with a 48% share and IE7 with a very respectable 25% share which has grown 7% to 32% nearly one third of the internet population, already in November. But that is due in large part to MS making IE7 a recommended update. If you visit w3schools which is a site geared towards web developers and web designers, you will see a higher Firefox usage as more and more developers are adopting Firefox.

"W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. This fact indicates that the figures below might not be 100% realistic. The average user might have display screens with a lower resolution. Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files over five years, clearly shows the long and medium-term
trends".

Developers need to realize that you cant simply adopt a new browser like Firefox while it IS better and not design for IE because far too many people are still using IE6 which doesn't support PNG alpha transparency and haven't updated to IE7 which does support png transparency and IE7 like its older brother still doesn't follow the guidelines for the better box model.

Personally, I design for Firefox then tweak for IE. If that means I don't use or "zero out" my margins and simply nest another div inside the first one with lesser dimensions to give the effect putting a margin on the first div would have given me but because of the differences in Firefox and Internet explorer (internet exploder) We are forced to use "hacks", "tweaks", or simply not use margins or padding either with nested divs or with nested tables. A designer or developer who only designs their clients' site(s) for use in Firefox is doing that client and all the clients' web site visitors to come a huge disservice. As most of those website visitors will be using Internet explorer 5, Internet Explorer 6 or the new almost got it right browser from Microsoft, Internet, Explorer7.

Now don't get me wrong I'm no Mozilla shill. Although I do like Firefox better than IE and it is my main browser of choice I know it isn't perfect. It crashes far more often than Internet Explorer does (at least in my experience). Sometimes it crashes because Im working in a Firefox window using a wysiwyg editor called FCK editor that we use in our CMS, sometimes it crashes because Im switching windows from Firefox to WSFTP Pro, or sometimes Firefox crashes because I didn't touch anything and I looked at the screen too hard (crashes of its own accord).

W3Schools Browser Statistics Month by Month: 2006 - 2007
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Display Resolution

The current trend is that more and more computers are using
a screen size of 1024x768 pixels or more:

Resolution Stats: The Counter.com

Sat Sep 1 00:01:01 2007 - Wed Oct 31 23:58:00 2007 61.0 Days
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/October/res.php

We are assuming the high Unknown users percentage are resolutions higher than
1600x1200 which TheCounter.com cant test for properly (1920x1200)

W3Schools Resolutions Stats: 2006 - 2007 (Semi-annual statistics)
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

A good web developer/designer will keep a watchful eye these trends and do it from multiple sources to get a good idea of what people are getting on the internet with. They should also take care in designing their website or their paying clients websites to ensure a enjoyable experience in visiting the website. By taking care to use valid XHTML and valid CSS and know the real differences from one browser to another in parsing the html and css to make that website they have designed "work" in as many of the top browsers and at the largest resolution currently showing the largest usage (1024x768) which means a fixed width site should be a minimum 776 pixels wide to a maximum 990 pixels wide with 923 pixels wide being recommended (923 pixels wide gives us a nice proportion on a 1024x768 screen with nice, not too wide gutters, outside of the page to the left and right).