creating a ecommerce application, how long did it take you?

Question

I don't seem to like any .net ecomm app out there and was thinking of rolling my own.

My requirements are pretty straight forward. 1. only u.s customers can purchase 2. tax in only 1 state 3. simple category structure (2 levels) 3. products don't have any variants, unique by the sku

It seems there really isn't much to it. I already have the design, just need the backend work so things like:

GetCategories GetChildCategories GetProductsInCategory

Cart (addItem, deleteItem, update, select, create)

Then I have some user account work, and then listing past orders for a customer.

Then in the admin side, listing orders by date range, listing order items.

Checkout

Has anyone ever done this before? How long did it take you? Am I crazy to roll my own?

Answer 1

It doesn't worth the effort to roll your own. Go get OSCommerce or other open source ecommerce framework and customize from there.

Answer 2

It probably won't take you long to throw something together, but you'll spend the rest of your life supporting it - and that's where the pain lies.

Answer 3

Rolling your own ecommerce is quite like rolling your own CMS. There are plenty and more implementations out there, commercial and not, but there are always reasons to do your own, and there's always someone asking whether he should do it or not. So make your research, and if you don't find anything useful, roll your own. Only, make sure it's really better than what you'd find, especially from the usability point of view. If your CMS is crap, then it's not a problem because only a few people will use it. If your ecommerce is crap, then people will go somewhere else. Plus, you should be confident with managing people's money...

Answer 4

For perspective, I recommend that you read Jeff Atwood's 'Code: It's Trivial' before you begin this endeavor.

Answer 5

My employer writes e-commerce software. It's a surprisingly difficult domain. Representing all the stuff that people want to do with products, carts, categories, etc takes a bit. You also have to make sure it's very fast and you have to be secure, especially with respect to credit card information.

There must be some other package out there that does what you want.

Answer 6

There are a lot of ecommerce solutions out there, both commertial and free.

Since your requirements seem quite simple and straight forward, I would recommend the following tools:

• WordPress. Although it's originally designed for blogs, it has a lot of plugins that can help you implement an ecommerce site really quickly. It's really fast to deploy and relatively easy to customize.
• wp-ecommerce plugin. link. This is probabbly not the strongest e-commerce plugin available, but it's certainly the fastest to deploy, its free version is good enough for a small business and its admin side is really easy to use. It supports different payment methods, categories for products, software downloads, shipping calculators and more.

With a little PHP knowledge, and some experience with WordPress you can have your site up and running in a few hours.

I implemented a site using the above tools in about 5 hours from scratch. The store is not the best, or the most nice-looking, but it provides everything needed to start selling. The site is Asparagus Soap (Still under development, and needs some polishing...)

Answer 7

I did it and it took me about a week off and on. Rick Strahl has an old blog post on implementing this for PayPal:

http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/PayPalIntegration/PayPalIntegration.asp

There is also a good selection of books on Amazon covering this topic:

Amazon.com: asp.net e-commerce http://bit.ly/3GCUH

The one problem you will come up against is the fact that ASP.NET allows for only one form to be present, which is a pain when trying to post your info to PayPal. I posted a simple, non-hacky, solution to this here:

http://www.codersbarn.com/post/2008/03/08/Solution-to-ASPNET-Form-PayPal-Problem.aspx

More PayPal articles here:

http://www.codersbarn.com/post/2008/07/10/ASPNET-PayPal-Subscriptions-IPN.aspx

http://www.codersbarn.com/post/2008/03/27/Integrate-PayPal-Checkout-Button-with-ASPNET-20.aspx

This should get you started - it is very doable and does not involve a lot of code. :-)

Answer 8

Throwing something together that works would be fairly easy, but sitting there day after day, month after month tweaking, tinkering, fixing bugs and adding features to an application that only you can support is demanding.

Deciding if your return on the time invested is greater than grabbing a premade solution is something only that you can decide.

If you go forward with it, good luck, have fun and hope you learn something from!

Answer 9

You're not crazy to roll your own and I've done this. From scratch, a blank screen, it took me about 5 months, something not more complicated than what you have, but I had done this before. My first one took about twice as long but the real problems were with what someone in this thread mentioned, allowing for all the possible quirks by the customer and all the possible combinations used during the order process.

An example: ordering a sandwich at a restaurant. Different combinations of toppings may change the price but what if he wants side items that get you a discount? Do you suggest the discount? What happens when he wants to combine orders making other orders discounted...or not. But it's Tuesday and we give discounts on Tuesday that doesn't apply to other discounts except regular customers...or not. THAT is the hard part.