If you are building your own eCommerce site, then very early on, you will make a decision on the technology that will make the basis of your site.

Your first decision is to determine if you wish to develop your own system from scratch, or do you want to use readily available open source software and adapt it to meet your requirements. This usually comes down more to your situation, budget and time frame. If you have a short time frame and a low budget, then you really don’t have time to be building your own software, so you need to use open source.

In our case, we will be developing our own system from scratch (or rather rebuilding our old system from scratch), this is because we have time to work on the development of the system and it gives us an opportunity to blog about the system as we go, explaining how and why we did things as we go.

Open source software is a quick and cheap alternative to get your eCommerce system up and running, and some of the software currently available (magento, etc) is phenomenal. One of the major downsides that we find with open source eCommerce systems, is that generally they don’t quite fit with how you want to do things, and if you don’t know them inside out, it makes it much harder to change things to be more suited to your needs.

We also chose not to use open source technology as we would need to invest a significant amount of time familiarising ourselves with the system and how it works and how the coding works, so that if we decide to integrate it with a stock control system, we would be able to do so. This all takes up valuable time, which by the time we’re confident enough to be writing useful additions to the open source software, we could have just written a system ourselves that is tailored to our exact needs, but if we do need to modify it, it’s easy because we built it, so we can change it 10x quicker than anyone else could.

Once you have made a choice between open source and developing your own system, the next choice will only really relate to those that chose to build their own system, as choosing an open source software package will have already dictated to you what language will be used.

If you are building your own system however, you will need to decide what DB to use and what programming language you want to use in order to the develop the system. One of the most common combinations is a MySQL database with PHP, however Ruby on Rails is proving to be a big contender for PHP and is certainly worth a look in.

Because we have more experience in working with PHP, I chose to continue down the route of using PHP in conjunction with a MySQL database as it will enable me to quickly work through the development without having to learn new things by using ROR. At the end of the day, I think that whatever technology you choose to use, will not make much of a difference to the end result, it is just about what you are more familiar with and how confident you are that you can develop such a complex system using that technology.

It is a good idea to plan out the development of the software, so that you can keep on top of things and keep track of where you should be with the development, so that you can deliver the software in time to launch your new online store. With this in mind, I would suggest creating an implementation schedule, where you list all of the tasks and items that need to be built/developed in order to make the system, and then prioritise these, setting targets based on how long you think it will take to make. An important thing to remember is that you should prioritise features that are considered to be CORE functionality features, and then once these features have been completed, then you can start to look at features that are not a necessity to launch, but may well make your admin life easier.

Content management within an eCommerce site is often quite difficult to get right. The majority of eCommerce systems either skip over it entirely, or bolt on a poor / cut down CMS as more of an after thought than really planning how to make it work right. Another reason may well be that the developer simply doesn’t have the time to deal with functionality that isn’t always classed as a ‘CORE’ requirement.

A common way of dealing with this is to install a purpose built content management system along side an eCommerce system, but this makes things ultimately more complicated as the systems may differ significantly and no one (client or developer) wants to have to log into two different systems every time they want to change things.

Currently, we have our own content management system and we have our own eCommerce system. When it comes to eCommerce sites we have tried running a CMS alongside an eCommerce system, which didn’t work at all, we’ve tried putting a small ‘bolt-on’ CMS into the eCommerce system, which also didn’t work very well and required a developer to add new pages etc, the client only had a simple content box.

When we redevelop the new system, I intend to integrate a simple, yet effective and reasonably powerful CMS within the system. It will come with features along the lines of the following:

• Ability to add/remove pages and folders
• Ability to add content items to specified pages
• Ability to upload multiple images/files etc and link to them from the content.
• Will have set xhtml templates based on the design of the ecommerce site, that will be set by the developer and then the client can use them.
• Set up sections within the templates that can be edited by the user.
• Will use the same CSS as the site, but can be edited by the admin.

By working to integrate this from the start, it should make things a lot simpler.