I’m being asked to quote on ecommerce sites again, and I seem to remember a very interesting thread somewhere talking about why people recommend staying away from being responsible for building ecommerce sites, but I can’t find it now. Something to do with the problems that can occur due to the multitude of shopping/shipping differentials and laws when you sell in the UK and abroad etc. Can anyone point me to that thread?
I’m just wondering on small sites where they still want full payment options, whether to tell them to create their own shopping pages on a different platform and then use an offsite page in my Rapidweaver to link to that offsite shopping page. Is that a good way round it do you think? It will still show up in their website but then I’m not responsible for any issues they have with shopping/shipping? Or am I just a big fat chicken?
Basically you simply need to reach an agreement with the customer for whatever you are comfortable with. I use a 3rd party cart and the only thing to do in RW is add the product buy button (a short piece of code). But we use the “back end” only. The store pages are normal RW pages that I make and upload (not a “cart front end”). I just prefer to make and have control over my store product pages, navigation and makeup. This way the store also looks just like the site. Not a separate “store design.” You can setup the cart for customer access and let them maintain the product. You maintain the “install” (but buttons, etc). That’s just one option of many I think.
I’ve been using Ecwid and using their supplied code to integrate into Rapid Weaver. This means the client does all the creation and editing within Ecwid itself. If you need to see an example let me know.
I would go with the ECWID solution, you even get a stack for RW to integrate it easy into the RW project. The pro that I see there is, you don’t have to worry about maintaining the shop itself as ECWID is running the shop and software. ECWID Plugin
Cartloom eCommerce, is an excellent option for RapidWeaver users looking to create fully designed, ready to sell, product pages and product groups - that you can drag and drop into any RapidWeaver Stacks page. These embed product pages, and product groups, allows the client to easily manage product details in our online Cartloom admin.
We offer a completely free PLAY plan when you first sign up, this allows you fully explore all of our selling features, with using test payments. When a new store is completely tested and ready for processing live payments, you’d then upgrade to one of our paid plans. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help with. Thank you.