There are some great options for adding eCommerce to an existing website but all involve a variety of considerations
1) How many products are you selling? If it’s just a few, you can skip custom cart development and use PayPal buttons. Make a great product page, and get the code from Paypal. No worries about security certificates and it’s easy to add new products just by adding new pages and generating new buttons. The major downside of this is that there is no “customer management” built into the website and PayPal’s merchant fees are high on a per-transaction basis. But it is by far the easiest way to set up eCommerce on a site. We also set up a payment page for consultants so their clients can pay online through their website.
2) If you have over 50 products and want features like categories, invoices that are emailed to your customer, order tracking and multiple payment options, the next step up is going to include a shopping cart. The easiest way to implement one is to use an open source template option like WordPress and install and configure a plugin that has these features. If you want to add a shopping cart to an existing website you could do this as a subdomain, or you could rebuild your website as a WordPress website and take the opportunity to rethink your whole design approach.
3) Want a really full bodied shopping cart with an order management system that has tons of great features? 3PRIME can set up your site using BigCommerce.com which is a hosted eCommerce platform. Two examples of sites we’ve built using BigCommerce.com are scenting.com and shop.partnerspestcontrol.com. This method provides lots of features that you may not want right away but are available when you need them. I wouldn’t recommend this for managing content, but it’s great for managing products.
If you’re interested in any of these options or any of the services we provide here at 3PRIME then feel free to contact us.
