Best tools to build a ecommerce website [closed]

Question

First I would like to apologize if this is not the forum to be asking this question. If you can point me to the right forum, I will post my question there.

I am relatively new to web development. I want to build an e commerce website for a small business. I want to know what tools or technology should I use to build the site?

I googled it and it seems that there are just too many of them out there. I have some knowledge of Java, javascript, servlet, jquery, and jsp. I would like to use the existing skill set I have to build the website but if there are other better alternatives, then I would consider that approach as well.

I would like to have some animation(slide show) in my index page, shopping cart, and lots of pictures.

Please help. Thank you.

Answer 1

There's a ton of potential answers to this. I've built dozens of shopping carts and worked on ecommerce systems that did six figures in daily transactions. Some have been custom, some have been off the shelf systems. There's pros and cons to each. Overall it tends to be much more complicated than most anticipate.

With that in mind, I suggest some of the following requirements for you:

1. Pick an existing cart with a good support community
2. Pick a cart with a good track record that is fairly lightweight and nimble - at this point you probably don't want to get burdened down by hundreds of features you don't need
3. Figure out what you absolutely need in a cart - eg, digital downloads, inventory tracking...

I have used WordPress for a lot of smaller sites, and used wp e-commerce with it as well. I've grown tired of that plugin, and recently deployed woocommerce http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/ for a client. It's working great. It's well supported, easy to get started and offers a lot of customization capabilities.

It will also help you with the rest of the site since it's based on WordPress and there's plenty of options for things like a homepage hero/slider, pictures...