[ILUG] E-commerce website package?

[Tony Groves]

From: Tony Groves <tongro at eircom.net>
> I've been asked to develop a simple e-commerce website, and I'm
> wondering if anybody here knows of an off-the-shelf package that can
> be
> easily tweaked to suit.
> 
> The site needs to be made available in three languages (en/es/ca) and
> should be simple enough for the non-techie site owner to maintain.
> There
> would be a couple of thousand products with minimal details, but low
> traffic. Payment processing is not required; that can be arranged
> offline.

From: Michael Connors <connorsml at gmail.com>
> I recently tweaked Zotonic http://zotonic.com to create a very simple
> E-Commerce site using a PayPal shopping Cart. Basically Zotonic is a CMS,
> but you can add custom fields to a particular category, for example adding a
> price and a PayPal button to every resource of category 'product'.
> 
> http://michaelconnors.net/article/329/ecommerce-site

From: Kevin Brennan <kevin.brennan at redsquared.com>
> "easily tweaked to suit" depends on what needs to be tweaked and the
set 
> of skills the tweaker has.
> 
> while not for the novice 'tweaker' http://www.magentocommerce.com/ 
> provides plenty of flexibility to grow, extend and adapt.
> 
> It's using PHP with a MVC architecture with a relatively complex DB 
> structure but there are things which would be easier and more 
> maintainable than other e-commerce solutions.
> 
>  From experience the more complex architecture places some extra 
> overhead on your server, ie. it's not a light solution so a
reasonable 
> hosting package will be required and someone who understand how to
get 
> the most out of your PHP/Apache config.

From: Trevor Murphy <tremur.lists at gmail.com>
> I've used osCommerce http://www.oscommerce.com/ before . 
> Modifying it to blend in with the existing site only
> took a few hours (and I'm not into web design). Has support for online
> payments and an order processing backend that will print proforma
> invoices, email the client when an order is updated etc.
> 

Thanks a lot for those tips; there's plenty of interesting stuff there,
osCommerce especially. One of the key requirements is the multi-lingual
thing but the e-commerce end need only be basic. I'm thinking I might
just write it from scratch using PHP/MySQL. Fingers crossed.

Tony.