Selling A Product Online

I get asked often from friends or clients about e-commerce. Most people want to get involved with e-commerce in some way because everyone senses the easiness to make a profit. I'm not here today to discuss the validity of how easy it is to sell online. What I am going to do is go through the different options out there.

You can go with one of the big guys, like EBay, Yahoo! Store or Amazon WebStore. These options give you a certain amount of credibility and traffic. As you might expect the take a cut of the profit through a monthly fee or a percentage of sales or both. In return for this they take care of the merchant account and a certain amount of the marketing. If you are in the right market, these options can work.

Another option is some of the middle-tier SAAS e-commerce sites out there. Some of the prominent ones are Shopify and Vcart. These services will generally cost less (when considering per sale fee) then EBay, Yahoo! Store or Amazon WebStore. While the cost is lower, the marketing that the bigger guys help with either goes away entirely or is greatly reduced. These can be useful if you want to do a lot of marketing for website but don't have the technical expertise (or desire) to manage a custom built store.

The final option out there is to use an open-source commerce solution. You can go two ways here. A pure commerce solution like Miva Merchant, osCommerce, Zen Cart, and Ubercart. Or, you can use an extension of an open source CMS solution out there like Joomla or Drupal. While have experience with most of these options here, I prefer to go with a pure commerce solution because that is there main focus while the CMS extension is just an afterthought.

I will go more in depth with discussion about some of these options as I use them. Currently I am developing under an osCommerce platform, Joomla and Drupal extensions. While osCommerce is a little rough around the edges, if you put the time in, it seems to be the best of the ones I've tried. I still intend to try out Miva Merchant, Zen Cart and Ubercart so I can have a broader view of the options out there. As I try these out I'll have some more posts here.

Free CMS Websites?

So at Fine Line IT, we mainly develop websites using the Joomla platform. We have had great success using the platform so far with the few expected annoyances. For the most part it is free, enough of the components / modules work great and the platform is easy enough to customize for your needs when the Joomla component doesn't work just right.

The main reason anyone goes to an Open Source CMS platform is that it is free. Nothing beats free, right? When, we began the process of starting Fine Line IT, we decided we like free. We looked intensely for all products that were of no monetary costs. While other options exist in the free CMS arena, for various reasons, we chose Joomla.

So far, we have been impressed with Joomla. We have been able to accomplish everthing we want in a website using the CMS application and several of its components. I will begin to discuss the different components we use on another post. Suffice to say, if you look hard enough at the 1,000's of components Joomla developers offer, you can find a good quality free one that is close enough to solving your solution (forms, photo galleries, google map, etc) that it can be customized slightly to be perfect.

In the coming months, I will descuss in detail some of the components that we use and how we use them to build great quality websites.

Reopening of Improve Development

The improvedevelopment.com blog has gone live today. This blog's intended audience is for like-minded programmers and web developers. The blog will discuss anything in the programming / web development world. This could be anything from discussing the use of an extension in Joomla to talking about project management of web sites.