What is best platform when building an e-commerce website?

Question

We are a very big retail company located in the Middle East, we want to launch a perfect e-commerce website.

What is the best platform used to build an e-commerce website?

What is the difference between 'AJAX, MYSQL, PHP....and if you know any other ones"?

What should we concider when developing that website?

Define a pefect e-commerce site and how usually people rate it?

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Regards

Answer 1

If you are a big company that expects to make a high volume of sales via your e-commerce site. You'll need to buy good quality webservers, preferably running linux with a load balancer, or just have a look at cloud webhosting as this will allow you company to only pay for the resources that you use.



I'd always recommend using Linux with Apache with nginx for your platform.



PHP is a programming language normally used to generate the content on websites, this fits in well with MySQL which is a type of database. The PHP would normally get a list of products from your database and display them on the webpage. This database would also store orders and user details, plus any other relevant information your business might need.

AJAX is there to make your site that bit more user friendly. For example, if you use facebook you'll notice it has facebook chat and also content that appears without you having to reload the page. There are a few more functions to ajax aswell such as, submitting forms, etc...



When it comes to the development consider a few of these:

How long it takes the user to get to know the site and its layout.

Is it simple to navigate

Does it fit your needs and the user's needs

The timescale of the development

How easy will it be to integrate it into your current systems (if any).

As well as selling just products on there, is there another source of income from it (e.g. Advertising)

Your target market

How much it appeals to impulse buyers

Is the checkout procedure going to be simple

Is it search engine friendly



A perfect e-commerce site is a site that looks nice and professional, completely intuitive, and allows its users to find what they want in a matter of seconds.



Look at Amazons layout, CPC's layout, Ebay's layout. They all have something in common.

The minute the page loads you're shown a search bar, list of categories, a list of offers and new products. You'll find this with a lot of e-commerce sites.



Hope this helps,

Adam :)

Answer 2

Use a Linux or Unix based platform, not windows. Use Apache or lighttpd to serve the web pages.



Then you will need PHP. PHP is a script language that is more powerful than pure HTML. You use PHP to parse information and make calculations that HTML cannot do. PHP is executed on the server and then pushes the HTML code to the client.



Mysql is a database. The database is used to store tons of information on your website, like prices for products, peoples address information and so on. PHP has the ability to interface with mysql quite nicely, so that you can push data to mysql and retrieve it.



Ajax is a javascript library that makes it really easy to make rich looking websites such as tabbed browsing and so on. Javascript is a scipt language that is parsed on the client computer.



I am not sure what you mean by...



Define a pefect e-commerce site and how usually people rate it?



A good e-commerce website should be easy, simple, intuitive, nice and professional looking. And above all a customer should be able to find exactly what they want in a matter of seconds, or else the will go somewhere else.



A good place for you to learn how to build a e-commerce website is to start with oscommerce.



Do a search on oscommerce and download and install it. It is free. It will help teach you how to create your own.

Answer 3

Take into consideration that web hosting is a global service. It does not matter what country you are located in; US, UK, Canada, Australia or Middle East. It is good to note that the cost of hosting services in most countries is generally a little more expensive in comparison to the same services in Canada and the United States. Specifically, American web hosts offer a much better value for money than any local hosting.



Take a look at:

http://www.threehosts.com/business



There you can reach the three reputable companies that are leaders in the E-commerce web hosting industry. They fulfill all your requirements to sell online or do/accept any online payments. By using each of them, everything you need for such a website is provided in one business Hosting Package.



Hope this helps.

Answer 4

The above answers are excellent, but I wanted to add a note on security. With an e-commerice website, you will presumably be handling monetary transactions. Your users need to be assured that their personal and financial information is kep safe from thiefs and hackers. It will be a requirement for you to use SSL HTTPS Secure Encryption Portocol for all client-server transactions involving personal information.

You'll need to buy an SSL certificate from a company like http://verisign.com/ or http://digicert.com/ (two leaders in this area).

Answer 5

Why would people be buying .pdfs? What is the actual product? Thats a lot of questions for free advice,

Answer 6

For a DIY option checkout https://yovigo.com