Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

8 items tagged “ecommerce”

2013

What would be a good web application framework to use for running a small online retail business?

I’d look at hosted SaaS solutions rather than running your own. I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve heard excellent things about www.shopify.com

[... 47 words]

What systems/software are absolutely worth purchasing for a solidly funded e-commerce startup?

I’d use a small fraction of that budget for relevant SaaS subscriptions—things like www.kissmetrics.com or www.mixpanel.com for user analytics, www.moz.com or www.ginzametrics.com for SEO reporting, or www.geckoboard.com for building a custom dashboard.

[... 93 words]

How long should I budget for an experienced designer to design a responsive ecommerce store?

There’s no single answer to this—it depends on the scope of the project. A one-page store selling 3 items is quicker to design than a thousand page store with dozens of category homepages etc.

[... 87 words]

What is the difference between Windows and Linux for web hosting, in other words, what are the pros and cons of each, each’s limitations, performance development environment and deployment between Windows and Linux?

Any and every operation you perform on a Linux server can be trivially automated by copying the commands you ran in to a text file. I haven’t managed a Windows server in years and I hear PowerShell is pretty great these days but an OS based around a GUI is always going to be harder to automate than one based around a command line.

[... 156 words]

What’s the best platform I can use for a food delivery startup? Shopify? Or should I instead learn to code?

Don’t build an e-commerce system as your first programming project—I know engineers with many years of experience who wouldn’t trust themselves to write code that handles money.

[... 103 words]

2012

What happens at Amazon once I make an order?

Here’s a fascinating article about Amazon’s fulfilment center in Swansea, Wales which gives a glimpse behind the scenes: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/new...

[... 35 words]

Does Amazon have a API for websites to utilize order and delivery fulfillment?

The Amazon Fulfillment Web Service used to handle this http://aws.amazon.com/fws/—but their site now says "Effective June 2012, Amazon Services will no longer support Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS). All functions and services currently supported by Amazon FWS are currently available through Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS)." So I guess you want the Amazon Marketplace Web Service: https://developer.amazonservices...

[... 82 words]

Which web frameworks should I focus on to make myself the most well rounded and to be able to solve the most problems as a web application developer/architect?

Being an expert web developer isn’t about which framework you know, it’s about the fundamentals. It’s important that you know how the tools you are using work, so you can fix things when they break—Joel Spolsky’s law of leaky abstractions is a great essay about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...

[... 260 words]