Hi, I am new with ecommerce platforms and there’s a lot of good info here but could someone tell me if every platform is designed to integrate its features in an exhistent website CMS? If I already have a website for my company, do I have to build a new one with the e-commerce platforma or can I integrate with some kind of plugin or API?
Feedback will be very apreciated.
Cheers
theo
There is no true universal CMS or Cart. Instead you find some that work with others out of the box, some that require more tweaking and many that have no integration at all.
Your best bet is to search for carts that are listed as partners or integrators with your CMS to insure a fit.
Magento is CMS integrated. Try to check it out.
Its hard to recommend a CMS without knowing what your site does, for instance Magento is a great eCommerce CMS but do you actually need eCommerce features at all?
Thank you guys for your insight. My website is PHP and I would like to integrate online shopping features. The idea is to maintain my CMS (tailor made) and integrate some API of Magento or other. I think that I have to move the entire site to the Magento CMS right? Do you know cart softwares that can be easily integrated?
cheers
Why not setting up a shopping cart as a subdomain of your current website?
e.g. store.my-domain-name.com
There are plenty of shopping cart platforms that would allow you to do this. Just customize the store to match your current website (colors, fonts, background images, etc). Then just have customers go back and forth between your current site and your store without even noticing.
Good luck,
-Daniel O.
eCommerce Developer
“Research is Key”
Hello Theo,
If you want to easily integrate a shopping cart and online store in to the existing webpages of your website, without having to change your website CMS or existing design, then you could look at hosted cart store add-in solution to integrate straight into your existing website CMS.
A hosted cart store add-in makes it easy to copy and paste store buttons in to your webpages so the store integrates straight in to your existing website. It also make it straight forward to connect to your secure card payment processor for taking customer payment for an order in to your account, e.g. PayPal as a payment processor.
A hosted cart store add-in solution will mean you will have no software or database to install and manage on your own servers as this is all managed for you. It also means you’ll automatically gain the latest features and enhancements to the shopping cart software without having to manually upgrade the shopping cart software yourself.
If you wanted any assistance with what you are planning to do then I would be happy for your to send me a Private Message where I will be able to help you out.
If you go the route of a subdomain you won’t be able to take advantage of all the inbound links to your main www domain. I think it’s usually worth the effort to try and integrate both content and shopping pages on the same domain.
I agree with mattmac, for a website to grow as it is, using a subdomain for your product selling could be a drawback to your website SEO-wise. Especially if you would be using most of your products as your main content for your website, I recommend you should work on integrating your e-commerce platform to your php designed website. Reading through ecommerce design programming could help you find some answers.