August 28, 2007

Well, I’m currently monetising Jonk’s Bargains and today was a good day! A really good day in fact : I made more than $100.

I’ll tell you how soon, once I get $25 for each referral. (It’s only fair!)

And you don’t have to pay any money. How could it get any better than that!

Those who were around me as I started my business will remember how much difficulty I had with shopping cart software. I was willing to pay several hundred dollars for the best solution but in the end I settled on Zen Cart.

Now, Zen Cart is really crap but it had a couple of features that I needed - coupons, gift certificates and the ability to offer all sorts of options on my tailored shirts.

I’ve been tracking the progress lately of a new set of shopping cart software called StoreSuite NX.

They have been blogging about it as well and it’s interesting. I try to ignore the picture of Mitch (he’s completely washed out against his white shirt and the background.)

 The exciting thing about it is that it seems to be so user-friendly. My coding skills are basic in the extreme - all I can do is modify HTML. The only site I have done without help is Jonk’s Bargains; where I modified a CSS template.

So, given that not all of us are freakish PHP coders, or whatever the hell language those things are written in, it’s surprising that so much software is so unfriendly to the basic user.

It’s got the standard features of the elite carts - integration with payment gateways and shipping options but the one that excites me is you can drag and drop panels. Great, so I don’t have to pay someone to go and muck around in code for me, do a crap job and charge the earth. If you have a free wordpress.com account you’ll understand the value of drag and drop; after I installed Wordpress on my own server I have had such a difficult time doing anything. For example I can’t get the archives page to work, or for people to be able to click through posts by month.

I haven’t heard of this feature from anyone else despite how obvious it sounds.

Here’s a wish list for shopping cart software

: As much design customisability without coding knowledge as possible. Such as being able to just change the colours of certain things without having to dig into code. Colour is very important to me.

: Gift certificate.

: Coupons.

: Easy shipping configuration.

: Configurable products.

: Drag and drop panels, easy to remove panels.

: The top bar.. banner thing. I want to be able to remove it easily and replace it with the one from my site so there’s congruency.

: Even better than the one previously mentioned, it’d be great if I could just integrate it into my site around my menu and banner. Although this MAY be beyond my coding skills.