Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Opening New Store Front

Earlier, I was mentioning that I was looking for a tool that I can use to maintain the products for my chocolate site.  Mainly I wanted to find a solution so that users can use mobile or tablet to view the site. It is amazing that on my site statistic, 45% of the users are coming with phone or tablet based on Google analytic (See my previous post about obtaining Google analytic). My earlier site which is my own written html/php was not mobile-friendly.I tried few options such as ecwid (See my previous post about ecwid), and I found OpenCart.

 OpenCart is open-source php base shopping site software. I really liked the features available, and the community using this tool is huge. Larger the community is, the better for us so that there are more helps available when needed, and also they will have more templates and tools available. Based on how I looked around, openCart has a lot bigger community then ecwid as of now. (Nov 2014)

From the cost perspective, openCart is free (open source) as long as I am able to maintain it myself (which is not as easy as ecwid -- see below). However, I ended up paying for extensions and SSL certificate (See my previous post about obtaining SSL certificate); therefore, the cost turned out to be about the same as ecwid for the first year. Keep in mind that the free software comes with a cost of hassle of setting up and maintaining the software where for ecwid, users don't have to worry about SSL and hosting etc.

It has been quite challenging to have OpenCart up and running.  One of the biggest hurdle for me has been that the latest release of v2.0.0.0 which was released only one month earlier than when I am writing this post. This is a major release which introduced mobile-friendly responsive design which I really want, but there are so many bugs and unsolved items which turned out to be a hassle for me each turn to setup.

Here are few problems I encountered;

1. The software is dramatically different from earlier version of v1.5.x, and it has only being released for one month, not too many extensions are yet available in the market.

2.  The code is buggy; and not too many posts that I can find on the web to solve them because it is so new that people have not encountered with those bugs yet. I end up being the first tester and the Ginny pig.  I contacted about bugs through github, and the developer community has been quite responsive to my questions and reports for bugs.

3 No templates are available yet.  One of the great things about being part of large community is that they would have tons of options for me for the templates that look great. Opencart itself looks really good already, but there are other templates available for earlier version but not the latest version yet.


There were other things I had to do in order to have openCart running. I created couple of posts along the way so you can read them if you want.

1. Creating Privacy Policy and Term of Use for My Site

2. Obtaining SSL (https) for my site


And here is my new site address: https://www.guidea.com/shop/
At this point it is only in English and Japanese, but I am working on other languages now.
I'm pretty happy with it; it looks great from mobile as well!


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