how to build e-commerce shopping site software?

Question

I've a plan to build a e-commerce shopping site software. Let anyone who wants a e-commerce site, he will sign up on my site e-commerce shopping site software, then a store will be created for him with subdomain, if my e-commerce site is e-commerce.com, he signed up with store name "sample", now he will have a store like sample.e-commerce.com. He can also point his domain to this store, with separate admin access for that site - can update the configuration for him(theme, discount, product bundle, select payment gateway etc), can start to sell. I prefer to build this site using php. See the following similar sites -

shopify, vendr, foxycart, bigcommerce, volusion, bigcartel, corecommerce etc

i prefer to build my site using php, what should be the architecture? how i should start build? Is there any existing tool? Is there any existing tool in other languages(ruby, python)

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi!

Take a look at Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/): it is an open-source CMS create specifically to easily create e-commerce sites. It ships with a multi-store functionality... and it has many additional interesting features, like SEO optimization procedures, etc.

You could start installing that, testing it on your local system and eventually adapting it according to your needs. I think it is a great tool and it can save you a great deal of work.

Magento is written in PHP.

Cheers, Gianluca.

Answer 2

This is a very broad question. I suggesting reading up on the MVC pattern. If you want to do this in PHP, I believe CakePHP provides a good way to do MVC in PHP. There is also a shopping-cart solution that is already written in PHP called Magento. It is open source so you can take a look under the hood to see how they do things. For Ruby there is Ruby on Rails, and the Groovy language has Grails. Java has a whole host of frameworks (Spring and JSF come to mind).