NZMac.com - Supporting the New Zealand Mac community

Hi there,

I want to build a commercial website with a webstore in it so that I can have a catalog of items for sale which users can purchase.

Does anyone have experience of a webstore which integrates with iWeb? Any recommendations?

Thanks

Gordon

Not that I am aware of, iWeb is mainly for personal sites (I believe).

Have a look at UberCart for Drupal (www.ubercart.org and www.drupal.org) and VirtueMart for Joomla! (www.virtuemart.net and www.joomla.org). Joomla and Drupal are free Content Management Systems, in fact this site is using Joomla!

CMS's (Content Management Systems) allow easy web site 'building' with no coding knowledge. I will admit they are a bit more complex than iWeb... - you can quickly get a powerful site, for free!

Alternatively if you are willing to splash out a bit of money, you should check out RapidWeaver, I haven't personally used it but it looks good - www.http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/index.php

There is a PayPal shopping cart plugin: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/addons/product_info.php?product_id=238

It costs but looks simple.

One of the issue that you may face (unless you are manually going to create every link for payment) is that any website that "pulls" info onto a page (like stock, sizes, colours, prices, tax etc) will generally get this information from a database...and iWeb isn't a database driven system at all. It means that most likely, if you do want to use a shop system, you'll have to use it slightly "standalone" to the rest of your site and that, if you are hosting on .Mac, you won't have much luck.

Keep in mind that what vectran suggests with things like Joomla or Drupal are database driven websites that can include a shop systems...not just shop systems. And what do I mean by shop systems? Well this one is getting some good buzz at the moment... http://www.openfreeway.org/

There are many more also.....but basically if you go that way, you're going to be looking at setting up hosting, mySQL (database) use etc, to build a shop site that you set up standard info for various items, then it is just a matter of adding individual infor for each item...the system (once set up properly) deals with display, shopping cart, some aspects of the transaction etc.

The easiest (but not the most pleasant) way would be like you see on the main page of this site. Go to the bottom right and click on the link to buy a coffee mug...hey, in fact, buy one if you like ...and you'll see it take you to PayPal. The link that did all this was all created within the PayPal website...I then created the image, text etc to appear on this site. Not a nice way to do it, but one you could do if you only had a few items to sell.

Phil

Freeway looks great! The other one I was looking into was Magento - www.magentocommerce.com

I would recommend the PayPal buynow buttons as well, easy and simple (I should have thought of that ).

After looking at Freeway I just realised it is a port of OSCommerce

Yeah sorry should have said. The reason it is getting some attention that I know of is that it has a bridge for Joomla, so could be linked into a Joomla site easily....probably has other bridges too.

Phil

Hi everyone, thanks for all your ideas. Some really useful stuff in there.

I am new to Mac, but have run internet businesses before and previously built websites on PC (e.g. Back2Go - no I dont have an interest in them these days - before you accuse me of advertising ).

What we are looking to do now is to start a new business which sells stuff, so we need a shopping cart and ability to take payment over the internet but we want to try to keep costs down by designing and building the website ourselves. I like the look of a couple of the iWeb templates and would love to do the whole thing on my Mac, but need to include shopping cart and credit card functions etc. I could always just go and do it all in .NET, but then that wouldnt be fun...

Paypal looks OK - we used it in the UK as a payment system but it was expensive compared to banks and am I right in saying that it transacts in AUD not NZD here?

The shopping cart sites look good, but not sure how I integrate that with an iWeb template. Looks like i need to use my own design not a template? Maybe someone can correct me on that one?

Also, are there other iWeb templates available apart from the 20 or so which ship with Leopard?

Will keep looking, but any other ideas people have I am keen to read about.

Gordon

Paypal looks OK - we used it in the UK as a payment system but it was expensive compared to banks and am I right in saying that it transacts in AUD not NZD here? No you can set your account to deal with NZD fine. They do take a fair hunk in transaction fees.

The shopping cart sites look good, but not sure how I integrate that with an iWeb template. Looks like i need to use my own design not a template? Maybe someone can correct me on that one?Nope..you're correct. iWeb is not something that can easily integrate other systems.

Phil

Thanks Phil,

am going to try out RealMac and see how their demo works. Should be fun!

Gordon

Not a bad solution. I looked at Coda today thinking it might have plugins, but in fact RealMac does have a plugin you can buy....
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/addons/product_info.php?product_id=238

Phil