Shopping Cart and CMS

onelesd has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Being unsure of which section to post this in, this section seemed like the best fit.

I've developed all kinds of different applications, web and traditional, but I've never had the need to develop a shopping cart.

I browsed CPAN and did some Google-ing, and I came across Handel and Mango. Mango seems to be a framework built around Handel. Neither of these has seen recent development so I'm loathe to just jump in and start writing code.

If you had 100's of products to sell and you wanted a solution you could customize as needed and have full control over the UI, what would you use? Would you write it from scratch? Use certain modules from CPAN? Handel? Mango? Some PHP(gasp!) framework?

I appreciate any advice based on real-world experiences. Thanks in advance.

Comment on Shopping Cart and CMS

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Re: Shopping Cart and CMS by Anonymous Monk on Sep 29, 2011 at 02:02 UTC
I appreciate any advice based on real-world experiences. Thanks in advance. I really did see these things on the CPAN :) Business::Cart::Generic Catalyst::Plugin::Session::PerUser Shopping cart is just session managment, use any framework you're familiar with ... Some related wisdom here My Experiences with using CGI::Application and Template::Toolkit To Build an Online Shopping Cart A Secure Shopping Cart option Building E-Commerce Sites with Handel Simplifying Design of Complex Workflows If I had 100s of products to sell I wouldn't roll my own, I'd use things like yahoo merchant or ebay	[reply]
Re^2: Shopping Cart and CMS by onelesd (Pilgrim) on Sep 29, 2011 at 19:40 UTC
The Yahoo Merchant services (which I had not considered before your suggestion) look attractive feature-wise. Have you (or anyone other monks) ever implemented and customized a Yahoo Merchant store? What were your general thoughts of it and what were the challenges with using it? My apologies for getting outside of the realm of perl, here.	[reply]
Re: Shopping Cart and CMS by Anonymous Monk on Sep 29, 2011 at 11:43 UTC
Think outside the box. How about third-party store managers such as, say, e-junkie.com or Amazon's store? You're not being asked to create a shopping-cart ... you're being asked to create a store. The best way to do that these days might just be to hitch a ride with an existing one and let them run the mechanics of the thing for you.	[reply]
Re: Shopping Cart and CMS by jdrago999 (Pilgrim) on Sep 29, 2011 at 21:07 UTC
Having developed plenty of shopping carts and CMS in the past, at this point I wouldn't bother. Use Yahoo Stores, Amazon, or something like that. Many hosting providers offer Magento which has a lot of users, an active community and plugins for just about everything. It's not Perl, but using something already built is like using CPAN (take something from the shelf and just use it). AFTER YOU HAVE LAUNCHED and you're making money, then look at what you do and don't like about the cart and CMS. Do you need different shipping options? Do you want to offer discounts and promotions not already possible within the software? Is there a different payment back-end that you need to connect with? Basically, get something off the ground first -- then come back and see what you'd like to change. Otherwise you might be looking at months of waiting before you make your first sale (when you could have already gotten hundreds of customers by that time).	[reply]
Re^2: Shopping Cart and CMS by onelesd (Pilgrim) on Sep 29, 2011 at 21:08 UTC
Good advice. Thank you!	[reply]