As a quick and dirty solution you can very easily use a Paypal shopping cart and 'Add to basket' buttons on your site. I did my first site in this way for customers to purchase engraved items. The customer has to select the colour and the size of the item, and enter the engraving details.
They checked out through paypal, and you receive a payment notification via email of the product bought, plus the options selected.
This worked well, is quick to put together, but is not a great way to manage a catalogue of products that is constantly changing, to manage stock outs etc, limitations on how you charge shipping etc.
I did my second site in OS Commerce using a similar approach (osCommerce is a shareware ecommerce solution). i do not have images of how the item will look based on the options selected - there are 'general images. This approach allows for variable pricing based on the option selected. This was achieved through standard OS Commerce plus a few extra developments to handle the capture of engraving instructions. I am not a developer but managed to work my way through this as a 'midnight project'. Example: http://www.collarsandtags.co.uk/medium-large-p-74.html
I think it would be possible to develop this a little further to display an image based on the options selected but is beyond what I could do and I don't want to use developers at present.
So in summary - a standard ecommerce package with a little bit of development around the edge should do.
If you see a shopping cart application you like - find some developers who work with this who can add the 'extras you need'. No need to start from scratch. |