I am a Web Developer student still in uni, hoping to start my own business in the future. I have built and deployed several static websites, and have recently built and deployed a couple of WordPress sites. My DB experience so far is largely conceptual.
I have been approached by a ‘friend of a friend’ to build an e-commerce website for an international company (they sell incontinence products). I’m not specifically sure of the sales volume but estimate it to be around a maximum 500 transactions per day. Being an international site, it would obviously need to facilitate, shipping and payments from a number of countries. This company knows that I am a novice, and are not expecting a site launch for a year.
Starting a career as a Web Developer, I’m assuming jobs similar to this may arise time and time again so I am hoping to pick a framework that is accessible to my current skill level, but can also ‘grow’ with me as I develop.
I do not want to use ‘template solutions’, so obviously with some WordPress under my belt, that was the first place I turned, but reading the word ‘glitchy’ repeatedly in several forum threads has diminished my confidence.
Magento is the word I’m hearing everywhere, but it is mostly described as ‘complex’, while Shopify seems to be the ‘quick fix’.
Can anyone recommend a framework that won’t take me a decade to master, but is powerful, and reliable enough to stand the test of time? Do I just bite the bullet and surrender this year to learning Magento? Are these WordPress/Magento Hybrids any good?
Any advice would be much appreciated 🙂
Since you handle quite ok WP I would recommend this http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/ . However you need to test it quite heavy to make sure nothing escapes.
Magento is one of the best (some say the best) and I suggest you might start reading some documentation about it since you want to make a career in this.
Good luck!
There are a number of open source e-commerce platforms out there. The most popular use PHP which is definitely a transferable skill (so you wouldn’t be wasting your time).
This gives you a decent list of the best apps out there:
http://www.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=3&category=eCommerce
My personal preference is http://www.oscmax.com which is about to release v2.5 of its platform. Built on osCommerce (the original open source e-commerce platform) code but with all the common modules installed for you but that is because I like the freedom to code the store how I like it not how the software company likes it!
However, if you are looking to get a job deploying e-commerce then Magento is probably the way forward since it is the most “commercial” of the open source platforms.