Online marketing has become a popular thing in the market. If you are running a big showroom or a small shop in your area, sooner or later you have to take your business from your shop to the Internet. Your decision will soon increase your sales. Learn to build online shopping website.
How to Build Online shopping website – Code an E-commerce website
Many vendors hire developers to build them an online website for their sales. This seems to be a huge capital when your business is in your starting state. We are going to provide you some open source e-commerce websites that can let you build online shopping website for free & without coding.
Built an ecommerce Website from Scratch – Create your own online store
Here I am writing details of some open source on-line shopping carts:-
OpenCart – Best Ecommerce website builder
This site provide you a nice user interface with Search engine friendly features. It has a robust service for online merchants. The admin panel of OpenCart let you control the site more efficiently.
AgoraCart – online store builder free
Custom changes are easy to apply in your existing website. Agoracart allows many custom options like different tax rates, back-end store management and many more. It is a PA-DSS Complaint (PCI-DSS) & supports more than ten payment gateways.
Magento
It is used by many country merchants. Magento platform offers more prospects, products. It is supported by developers across the world. In 2011, E-bay acquired magento. Magento provides scalability presentation, content and functionality. Magento has many other features that let the merchant promote his business. Some of them are marketing tools, search engine optimization, product catalogue management and browsing & managing the shipping process.
osCommerce
It provides the basic template with lots of customizing features. It has many features to manage the front end & back end administration. There is a community of more than 2 lakh people who are working in the development of this open source tool.
PrestaShop
It is a PCI-DSS compliant e-commerce tool that can handle web store & customers , orders. Merchant can create & manage front end chores like display & marketing to Shipping details. PrestaShop can be used in multiple languages.
Zeus Cart
This tool is especially designed for small & medium size business. It has many tools that can be used by a non-technical person who is not much aware about technologies. The CMS & SEO friendly features are provided with Zeus Cart. Standard features like tax, Shipping & payment methods are included in it.
As there are so many options available for a person to prepare his online store. As per our opinion Open Cart is the best tool that should be used for the development. It is chosen because User Experience, Management, Features are included in it.
Setting up Development Environment – Building a ecommerce website tutorial
Open Cart works on PHP with Sql Environment. Follow us from starting to the end to build online shopping website.
Install Open Cart
Download Open Cart from here. After download extract the zip file in your computer.
The extracted folder will show you three files.
- “upload” folder :- It has all the files which you have to upload on your web server.
- “license.txt” file :- The license agreement is provided in this file.
- “readme.txt” file :- All the instructions of installation is written here.
Go to XAMPP folder(?????) & then htdocs & create a folder & name it as the name of your shopping site(for example : shoppingsite, myshopsite). Copy the upload folder in this folder
- Now open your browser & type http://localhost/myshopsite.
- Now Accept the license agreement & continue.
- In the next page you will see some files & find two files are missing. This is because you haven’t name them correctly.
- Go to htdocs & rename them same as your folder name.
- Go to your browser & refresh the page. Now everything is fine.
Configuration
Here you will setup your database & admin details. Now use the phpMyadmin console & create a database of your shopping site.
Enter the details of your newly created database in your OpenCart admin panel. Enter the database name & database connection details in the panel & admin details.
Now you are ready for sales.After this a red bar will display a message “Don’t forget to delete your installation directory!”. Go to the folder & delete installation directory.
After this enter your product details to show them on your website.
Now you have to hire an administrator who can manage the front end & the back end of this website. You need to enter the details of your products so that your customers can see them.
These are some links where you can detailed documentation on every aspect of this process.
Official Documentation
Recommended Books:
OpenCart 1.4 Beginner’s Guide
Instant E-commerce with OpenCart
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