

Ask HN: Best e-commerce solution for an online record label? - bmm

I've been asked to help put together an e-commerce store for an online music label. They are popular within a niche genre and those who know them are likely to visit their site so providing sales directly from it seems wise. In return for my efforts they are willing to offer me a cut of their profits.<p>Having done a bit of research my options seem to be:<p>- Write a site from scratch using Codeigniter
- Use Joomla + Virtuemart (open source)
- X-Cart (a framework with licensing charges of around 200 dollars a year)
- Try to find an existing solution from the 100s of hosted services (most of which seem unreasonably expensive and inflexible)<p>Although I'm fairly comfortable with writing my own simple projects with codeigniter I'm daunted by the task of writing a full ecommerce solution with payment facilities, security issues, etc. I have no prior experience and I feel that the time spent learning how to put a solution together might be better spent concentrating on the business side.<p>What's best for me? Are there alternative options I've missed?
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olefoo
Have you considered just putting together something that ties together the
amazon shopping APIs and a blog. If your client is making cds and getting the
UPC/EANs it should be trivial to sign up for amazon services and this has the
added benefit that your product becomes available through amazon itself and
through the various shopping formats they make available.

this link <http://bit.ly/yaIpc> goes to the sign up page. From looking at it
you need at leas the pro version if you want to create new products.

Good luck.

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bmm
That's a good suggestion. They currently sell CDs and vinyl through
traditional distributors. They might also sell other merchandise too. Amazon
would be a good way of tying it up.

The only objection might be is that they are part of a very independent/non-
corporate scene which might see using Amazon as "selling-out" (not my view,
but some people seem to think like this...). Still, Amazon's definitely
something to investigate, thanks.

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pageman
are you going to hit the China market? email me at paul.pajo [at] asiapay
[dot] com - we also have some turn-key solutions ...

~~~
bmm
Thanks for the interest, but at the moment the focus is on Europe, US and
Canada.

