Software Selection for Small B2C Site

I am exploring business possibilities for a small business B2C site in a niche market. As a former IT professional, I have had many years of experience with high-end B2C package solutions such as BroadVision, BEA and ATG. However, I do not know the small business end of the spectrum.

I would like to develop a site with rich parametric search capabilities (i.e., searching by a variety of product properties), and ultimately some ability for personalization. At the same time, I would like to leverage ready-made components or package solutions for the shopping cart and the interface to the credit card processor. Because the page content will be highly dynamic and the search must be customized, I cannot use an off-the-shelf solution or let, say, Yahoo build the site.

Any thoughts or advice from someone who has been down this road would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards,
Keith McNabb
[email protected]

I had a lot of luck with Atomz:

http://www.atomz.com/search/

I found it easy to use and it produced great search results for an online recipe service I used to own. As you can imagine, our archives were vast and we needed an accurate search function.

I'm not certain if it will work for your application. Take a look and let us know what you think.

I moved this thread to the Ecommerce Issues section, where it seems more appropriate and where it will be seen by the most readers interested in this topic.

--Kevin

If you're familiar with those applications, take a look at http://www.zope.org/

Zope is a PHP-based content management tool that is easy to get started with but is very extensible. There are many open source developers supporting it so chances are, most anything you want to do with it, someone has already offered up a shareware-like license for it.

Here are a couple of lists of vendors that supply what you're looking for:


http://products.ecommerce-guide.com/...ols/index.html

If you don't find it there, you'll probably find it here:

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Business/E-Commerce/

--happy searching

Not sure what your target market is, but if it includes non English speakers you may want to take a look at OSC at http://www.oscommerce.com/. The product is licensed under GNU/GPL - flexible, multilingual, good forum support, & free. Curious about your feedback.

Gary.

Hi,
Sofmen Inc. may have a product exactly meeting your requirements. For further discussion mail at [email protected] or you can visit there url at http://www.b2bparadise.com

Go with OsCommerce. It has so many powerful built in features and is Open Source which means you can add whatever features you need. All you need is a PHP developer.

Not to mention their incredible community support and MOD library.

I have hosted my site on http://b2bparadise.com, our site uses only a fraction of the features they offer, it is a complete e-commerce solution that has a catalog management section (didn;t found this on most ecommerce solutions). I have built my store up and ready in just 2 hours with about 200 items. I didn't required any html, ftp, webdesigning or any other tech know how. Just entered my categories, items, prices and upload images through their interface. Shipping Charge calculation, Sales Tax Calculation, Image Resizing, Reports on Orders received, coupons etc. were the built in features with them
They are charging $24.99 per month alongwith the hosting. <b>Definitely worth a try.</B>