making money, got an opportunity need CMS advice.

Hi,

I'm in the business of selling chemical compounds. I make 3-5 grands/month now only on this ecommerce. I buy my products wholesale from my company(chemical factory) and sell it with good margin worldwide. I have an employee who does the shipping and another one who takes care of the stuff.

I want to go forward and make bigger money in IM, and i don't want to have the hardship of looking after my employees, i talked with my company and they offered me an affiliate scheme (they handle the payments, customer relationship, storage, packing and shipping of the product).

This a rare niche. They don't have any affiliate backend. I need to set up a website and i need advice what CMS to use. I want to cover their entire chemical catalogue ~ 1000 products. I also want to have some control over the transaction, so that the company doesnt rip me off. I think maybe a ticket system for communication between the parties would be good. Correct me if I'm wrong, do i need something like a B2B ecommerce cms? something like alibaba.com would be suitable.

If you know any good free open-source PHP cms that would be suitable for my job, please guide me somewhere. thanks

i would personally use joomla with the following plugins virtuemart, community builder, sh404sef

joomla will handle your cms side
virtuemart will handle your oscommerce side
community builder will handle your customers
sh404sef will tie all this together with onsite seo

the way i would work it is

1) use virtuemart as a catalog for your products
2) for users to place an order they would need to signup, as they signup using community builder and create a profile, you can track what they order through a couple of plugins alternatively they would need to be possibly some custom work involved to do the tracking
3) you can follow up with an email to verify if they recieved there order ok... in doing so seeing if you are getting ripped off or not...

doing something like this especially without a proper affiliate backend from your supply does rely a lot on trust on your part

but hope the above pitches you a least some direction

hth

thanks

ukescuba

thanks for advice. i don't work with joomla really well. I simply always have a problem with upgrades and modules. :/

Rushdie said:

thanks for advice. i don't work with joomla really well. I simply always have a problem with upgrades and modules. :/

Click to expand...

thats too bad, well keep us posted on what you go with

good luck

I'm a big fan of Expression Engine. It's not free, unless you look around.

jmascis said:

I'm a big fan of Expression Engine. It's not free, unless you look around.

Click to expand...

thanks i will check it out

Look into drupal. Its an open source CMS and i know it has plugins for that kind of thing. If you decide to go this route and have any trouble just send me a pm and ill see what i can do.

I would recommend opencart.com for your needs, it is the fastest cart solution out there. Just change it to your needs ..

// .. ;-)

thanks for the hints guys.

I've looked into all of your ideas. Drupal is too complicated for me.

I'm now thinking about wordpress+wpml+wats or opencart, i need to install them to check if it will suit me in 100%



i repped and thanked all of you, cheers

When it is an Ecommerce site on a B2B scale . a secure environment should be your priority as far as the website is concerned.

Thought you should know that for a website of the scale and with the power you desire , I would sincerely recommend Drupal. I have built 30+ sites on Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal and thats what my experience has been.

OpenCart is also good but then so is ZenCart and Oscommerce if you are looking at purely ECommerce platform. These are not CMS's however and are E- Commerce Platforms and hence the functionality cannot be extended beyond the commercial aspect.

blackmagic_80 said:

OpenCart is also good but then so is ZenCart and Oscommerce if you are looking at purely ECommerce platform. These are not CMS's however and are E- Commerce Platforms and hence the functionality cannot be extended beyond the commercial aspect.

Click to expand...

If you look at OpenCart as for the extension part it is built upon a MVC(+L) style framework so it allows module extensions to be built.

It is very flexible if you look at the framework aspects and it is very, very fast in page loads ..

If you want to build your own solution CodeIgniter is good, but checkout this new framework DooPhp over at www.doophp.com/benchmark it is realy very fast ..

// .. =)

custom building is out of the question. I need it up and running in the beginning of september. Drupal was always hard for me in the aspect of tweaking it visually. That's why i prefered wordpress. I'm doing some more research and will post my results when i have them.

on the contrary of opencart, lately i had an experience with Magento, and it was awful, there were lot's of errors with upgrading etc. My client eventually changed to good old oscommerce

thanks again

what could you tell me 'bout opencart vs. prestashop?

I just installed opencart on my server and it looks ok. i managed to internationalize it in 5 minutes. prestashop seems to have a bigger community?

finally we decided to end up using wordpress + wpml
thanks for the help guys.

another question

in what cms could i make a website like this one: http://ec21.com ? thanks a million