eCommerce in an afternoon

Julie sent me an email yesterday to tell me that OpenEdit is listed as Best Rated by Users in eCommerce on the cmsmatrix.org homepage. After spending a few minutes feeling all chuffed I decided to answer an important question.

Why is OpenEdit's eCommerce getting such positive user reviews? While I could guess that it must be easy to set-up, or it must work well, or it must be easy to maintain, I also think guessing is a job for the weather network. If you have been reading the constant drivel I publish here week after week you know that I feel strongly that theories bow to real world results every time.

So I decided to put our eCommerce to the test. Could I create an online store using OpenEdit in an afternoon?

Seeing as there is no time like the present, I enlisted the help of Ian Miller and started work on an online store right away. We started at 2pm in the afternoon, Ian left at 5 pm and by 11pm I was done. We have a fully working online store called CampingInfinity.com which took 9 hours start to finish. This time window includes a break for dinner, a workout, and an hour of playing the Nintendo Wii with my kids. The store has real products (back country camping gear) from a drop shipper named Doba. The payment system is PayPal and the site uses OpenEdit Hosting (of course). If you want to test my results visit CampingInfinity.com, order a product and I'll send your order right away. I'm an online store owner! How sweet is that?!

Here are the details.

• Step 1 - Identify products for the store and find a source. Back country camping gear was chosen because of our interest in the products. Ian and I are planning a back country camping and canoe trip to Algonquin National Park this summer. The product source is Doba, a drop shipping solution we have been wanting to experiment with for few  months now.
• Step 2 - Deploy OpenEdit site, apply template and install the eCommerce plug-in. We followed the instructions within OpenEdit's documentation with one exception, instead of a stock OpenEdit template I applied a simple custom template. The little tent logo is based on an istockphoto image and rest of the layout is a very basic. Two column centered fixed width with header and footer.
• Step 3 - Import products, product images, and descriptions. Getting a mass product export from Doba was straight forward, and adjusting the spreadsheet to match the example inventory.xls found in the eCommerce plug-in documentation was not a problem. The most time consuming part of the process was getting the images into the store. Doba provided a list of links for each product image which we downloaded. After some experimentation, we found the fastest method of getting the photos into the store was to rename each product ID based on the name of the image. We then used search and replace within OpenOffice Calc to remove the extra path information and .jpg with the required -100. We also found a bug - the import button within the Catalog Manager was removed by accident during some changes we made a few days ago. A bug report was submitted in our Issue Tracker and will be fixed shortly.
• Step 4 - Connect payment system. PayPal was the obvious choice because PayPal integration with OpenEdit is already finished and with PayPal, we don't have to process transactions on our site. This means no SSL, merchant account, etc. While this won't work for all applications, for this exercise it worked very well. We already have a PayPal account set-up so we simply connected the 'Proceed to Checkout' button to PayPal and the payment system was ready to go. Ian and I were able to complete Steps 1 through 4 between 2 - 5pm.
• Step 5 - Display tweaks. After my workout, family time, and dinner, I sat down to complete the all important 'presentation' of the site. The menu needed a little adjusting, the display in IE6 wasn't quite right, and a few other minor tweaks were needed to get everything working properly. At 11pm I was able to browse our selection of back country camping products, add items to my basket, and proceed to PayPal to pay for my order.
• Step 6 - Transfer our development site to our live URL. Now and then, Ian and I register urls 'just in case'. we love to experiment with online projects. CampingInifinity.com is on this list. At some point last year we found this url and decided we might want to create a camping web site. We registered it using Namespro and transferring the development site to this URL required a few simple DNS entries. The switch took seconds.
• Done!

.Creating this online store was a really fun experiment. I think our next challenge should involve you. Perhaps we'll run an Online Store Give Away!

... more details to follow.