How to start creating an online store?

Question

Online shopping

Actually, an online store is needed, as an addition to an already existing outlet.
Questions to the habra community:

1) Engine - take one of the ready-made ones (OSCommerce, Bitrix, ...) or order your own (from scratch)? What is more expedient?
2) Design - how much can design + layout + development of an adequate UI cost?
3) The legal side of the issue - is it necessary to somehow document the online store?

Thanks for the feedback.

Answer 1

start by looking for an audience - if there is a buyer, especially a permanent or constantly arriving one, then the rest is details.
first try to make just a showcase (even a static one is possible), with a phone order and/or with an order through the feedback form.
when you have a flow of orders for which the notebook is not enough, then there will be money for the e-store (at least you can allocate enough funds for design and creation).

Answer 2

1) it all depends on what you expect. If the plans are serious, then it’s better, of course, to write a self-writing and keep programmers on staff to finish the functionality (and this will happen very often)
2) xs
3) no, you don’t need to draw it up. You, when selling goods, will punch checks already offline. Just put the details of the company on the site (legal address, TIN, KPP, current account, etc.)

Answer 3

In general, it all depends on how complex the store you are planning, as well as on what product you will sell.
In general cases, I recommend as a CMS - Simpla (http://simplacms.ru).
A very simple, convenient and easy-to-learn control system - both from the point of view of the user and from the point of view of developers.
Design - depends on the requirements, it's hard to say, on average, freelancers charge about 10 thousand for a high-quality design (4500 rubles for the main one, plus all the necessary internal ones).
But in the case of using Simpla, even with basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, you can finish what you want from standard templates (2 pieces included).
If you need help, please contact.

Answer 4

In a day, you can master the store using joomla + virtuemart even with zero knowledge.
The network has many forums on these issues and of course there are video tutorials.
ps I can give you a couple of links if you're interested.

Answer 5

1) Self-written engines are good, but for this you need to keep a team of programmers, and writing a functional web store in a couple of hours will not work. But, as the previous person said - it depends on the needs.
We now undertook to transfer the store just to the finished engine. We chose Magento, but I don’t know how correct the choice was, because from scratch it is quite difficult to figure it out. But for programmers who are familiar with this, pulling the design is not very difficult.
It’s better not to even look at OSCommerce - the system is old, the code is poorly written, quite a lot of bugs can come out.
On Habré, you can look for an overview of ready-made solutions. \
2) At prices - from zero, if you take ready-made skins and pull them onto a finished engine, up to "no matter how much it is a pity."

Answer 6

I don’t know what functions you need in the store, but OpenCart as a variant of a simple store, the advantages of MVC, open source, there are all the necessary modules

Answer 7

Regarding CMS, in my opinion, the best option is Drupal + ubercart module

Answer 8

In general, this is how I did it when I needed to trade my products through the Internet.
I just made up a website for myself, static HTML, it contains pages with product descriptions and pictures,
those who wanted to buy a piece of iron began to write to me by mail (via the sending form from the site)
and then I billed them and they paid.
The assortment expanded, it became quite laborious to add new products (although I only have 8-10 products)
I sat down and began to think what to do - write everything from scratch myself (distracting from production and then constantly
adding code) or choose something ready and run on it.
I looked at the raised demos and chose prestashop (http://www.prestashop.com/).
good community (and Russian), full of documentation,
mountain of skins. Delivered, indulged, looked in the code and stopped on it.
I wanted to simplify the registration procedure, checkout in one click… in general, all this was quite
easy to do because of the well-thought-out store architecture.
I had to spend a little time on Russification (some of the messages were translated there, some were not) and this is done
by regular means, very convenient, in general.
highly recommend.