e-commerce and storefront

[rdjain]

We are planning to launch an e-commerce solution for a manufacturing company. We have microsoft dynamics Navision ERP software. We are buying a configurator for filtering/configuring customized products. Also we are buying a storefront/shopping cart which is already integrated with the configurator. The Storefront we are planning to buy uses C#.NET and we are planning the launch a .NET e-commerce. Finally the ecommerce slution includes ERP(Navision) --> Product Configuartor --> Storefront/Shopping Cart --> Website. We would accept payments using credit cards (the storefront supports credit card payments) We will start with customizing storefront. However I have no clue where to start.

What does the website consist of? Does it just mean adding pages to the shopping cart software or customizing its existing pages? If not, how do we go about intergating a website with Shopping Cart/Storefront?

How does hosting for such an e-commerce solution work? Do we need to find a host who supports the shopping cart/storefront software we are buying or do we just need a hosting service that can launch our website?

What about the database of the shopping cart/storefront? Does the hosting server need a maintain a separate database or just the website can be interfaced to shopping cart/storefront to access the database on our company location?

Does the shopping cart and navision database needs to be separate or can we integrate everything together? The storefront/shopping cart we are buying, also uses SQL Server.

Any help/advice/links is greatly appreciated.

[Collabora]

I think your question should be reqworded to: How do I add content to my ecommerce site? Here are some of my questions:

What ecommerce solution are you using that will be integrated with the configurator?

How many products will be in your store?

Do you have a corporate site at this time?

[rdjain]

We are going to use something similar to znode singlefront / multifront.

We are about to launch 26 product lines, each product line will have virous categories ande ach of then would be configurable by the product configurator.

We do have a corporate site in php at present but we have planned to rebuild the website from scratch in .NET

[Collabora]

At the level you are working at, I don't see any problem with your developer being able to add content to the ecommerce site, or to integrate the shopping cart into a pre-existing web site (including the currently non-existent .net site).

For go-live hosting you will probably need a dedicated server, either on-premise, hosted, or co-located, depending on your internal IT situation.

The database will be determined by the store software. In the direction you are going that database will probably be MS SQL.

Your needs are beyond the scope of this forum. I recommend you join the znode community and the various microsoft communities for more high-level advice and to find a good developer/consultant to manage this project

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/Default.mspx

[rdjain]

Thanks for your reply.

[Collabora]

Here is another resource:

http://www.partnerpoint.com/