Call it what you will, the on-line sales process kicked-off barely 20 years ago, and I opened my first store in 1999, and swapped into osCommerce in 2000 \/ 2001 and stuck with it until last year.<\/p>\n
I have worked with a large number of eCommerce solutions and other open source platforms over the years for myself and clients.<\/p>\n
With a lot of other pressures I stopped searching and became complacent with my store leaving it run for too many years without an update. I worked with clients modifying platforms to suit their needs but in following the osCommerce method of hard-coding so much of the system any chance of a simple upgrade path was killed in a forked path that ultimately leads to a dead-end.<\/p>\n
So, what to do next?\u00a0 The open source store market is flourishing with more offerings than you can ‘poke-a-stick-at’.<\/p>\n
There are pure open-source solutions, open-source commercial products, 2-tier open \/ commercial offerings, pure commercial tools, as well as a lot of noise from service providers.<\/p>\n
Bricks and mortar stores have been changing, large shopping malls are being up-sized, or stagnating, with empty floor space. What-ever cannot be sold by mail-order is still viable in-store, but there are only so many coffee-shops, hair-dressers, nail salons, etc. that can survive in a centre, but I digress.<\/p>\n
So for the mail-order products, i.e. anything that can be posted, parceled, or containerised, is eligible for an ecommerce site. Is anyone not selling on-line ?\u00a0 While it may seem that everything is on-line it is simply not the case.<\/p>\n
Some studies show that consumers still want a physical shopping experience.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.businessnewsdaily.com\/7756-online-shopping-preferences.html<\/a><\/p>\n http:\/\/smallbiztrends.com\/2014\/08\/consumers-prefer-shopping-in-a-store.html<\/a><\/p>\n There is also an older but more in-depth commentary from the Harvard Business Review on physical vs ecommerce<\/a>.<\/p>\n