Shop Till It Drops: How Not to Make an Ecommerce System

It’s only been a couple years since I started developing ecommerce systems, so I’m not qualified to tell you how to build them. On the upside of things, my mistakes are so fresh in my mind that I can certainly tell you how not to build them.

Here are the top ten things I have learned to not do:

10. Show, don’t sell. Use small fonts. Create a beautiful catalog of your products describing them in lengthy detail and displaying them from all possible angles. Make the “Add to Cart” and “Checkout” buttons small, white and unobtrusive. After all, websites with an avant-garde aesthetic make a ton of sales, whereas tacky outfits like eBay or Amazon are going out of business.

9. Forget about product attributes, and assume that t-shirts, baby penguins and software are the same thing. Sure, t-shirts probably come in different colors and sizes, and you might need to ship them somewhere. Selling software might be tied to a digital media delivery and upgrade system. Customs might get a little antsy without information about where and how you’re sending baby penguins. But don’t worry about this now! You just need to sell stuff, and that’s all that matters.

8. Never test your checkout process after the initial launch. Remember that testing regularly is a waste of time. Things never break! Certificates never expire. Payment provider servers never change. HTML, Javascript and CSS work uniformly across all browsers, forever. Your developers and system administrators are top-notch professionals who never, ever futz with the code or delete files from the server.

7. Don’t worry about fulfillment, or data. Once you have a sucker’s money, you’re good to go. You don’t need a database to store order history or an admin interface to track shipment status. Reporting isn’t too important, since on April 14th you can probably figure out how many sales you made from your bank statements. The important thing, once again, is to charge someone’s card.

6. What’s SSL, anyway? In this modern world hackers are all in Guantanamo, so you can safely assume that no one will be trying to intercept your unencrypted credit card numbers. Your customers know this, so they won’t abandon their checkout process just because you’re missing some dumb padlock icon at the bottom of your browser.

5. Marry a payment provider. Totally build your ecommerce system around the specifications of one payment provider, such as PayPal or Verisign. You probably won’t find another payment provider with lower fees down the road, anyway.

4. Underestimate how easy it is to build an e-commerce system from scratch. Why bother to hire a developer when you can buy an off-the-shelf, enterprise-level ecommerce solution for half a million dollars?

3. Overestimate how easy it is to build one from scratch. Sure, you can build a good ecommerce system for under $5000. In fact, my twelve year-old cousin said he’d do it for less!

2. Pay a million dollars for a product that does everything. Just because you are only selling widgets now does not mean you won’t be selling widget-support-and-maintenance-API-delivery-mechanisms-and-emu-tracking-sattelites next week. PLAN NOW!

1. Pay nothing for a product that does nothing. My friend and I have worked for two completely unrelated companies that use the free, open-source system OSCommerce. The code is so bad that in order to adapt to evolving business requirements, we both had to rewrite it to the point of unrecognizability, at a much higher cost than either a custom or commercial system would have cost. Using a free product for anything remotely serious is probably a bad idea. But the best advice I can give is don’t listen to me—I’ve only been doing this for a couple years.