{"id":122,"date":"2011-09-02T20:28:18","date_gmt":"2011-09-03T00:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rumfordhills.com\/?page_id=122"},"modified":"2012-01-02T11:02:25","modified_gmt":"2012-01-02T15:02:25","slug":"opencart","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.rumfordhills.com\/?page_id=122","title":{"rendered":"OpenCart"},"content":{"rendered":"

eCommerce shouldn’t be hard, nor should it be expensive. So, what does it really take to setup an online retail shop?<\/p>\n

Being the IT Geek that I am, lets start with some requirements (starting with the obvious):<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You need to be able to find something to buy<\/li>\n
  2. Once you find it you need to be able to buy it<\/li>\n
  3. I want the money in my paypal account<\/li>\n
  4. I want to ship with those neat flat rate boxes (And I KNOW how big a 65 pound piece of luggage is, so under 70 pounds should be easy)<\/li>\n
  5. I need to be able to update how much I have to sell, and not sell stuff I don’t have<\/li>\n
  6. I should be able to make it look the way I want<\/li>\n
  7. And it should run on my existing website<\/li>\n
  8. And I don’t really want to have to pay anything for it!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    OK, so my bluehost account has a few “shopping cart” programs that you can install. Both Amazon and eBay have store fronts you can buy. And paypal has a pretty easy API.<\/p>\n

    I’ve looked at a few before and OpenCart seems pretty straight forward, so we might as well start with that one….<\/p>\n

    The installation went pretty smooth and in about one afternoon I had it working and integrated into a PayPal test account — sweet. Took another day for the post office to enable my account there, so now it does real-time pricing on the shipping (or it would if the shipping module worked right.)<\/p>\n

    Now to dig into the underlying code and see if I can make it dance!<\/p>\n