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new website problems

Started by cwest, January 05, 2012, 07:30:50 PM

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cwest

I have had a website designed and am on the last part - the paypal page. Now my designer is saying that I can't have it so that when something is sold the page shows this immediately as this is difficult. Also he seems to think that putting new stuff on the site will be too difficult for me to do. He was under the impression that I had lots of identical necklaces, identical bracelets etc etc., not one-offs.

Now I know I am not the most computer literate person in the world, but I can follow instructions. How difficult and time-consuming do you all find this to do? Am I being too ambitious thinking I can do it all myself?

Carolyn

Kaz

I think that's why a lot of us either opt for Mr Site (with all its inherent problems) or just sell through sites like etsy. It seems that the shopping cart is always the most problematic part of setting up a website.
Kazx
She's made of real glass. She got real real emotion. But my heart laughs I have that same sweet devotion!

Les

My solution was to go over to Etsy too :)

Kalorlo

The stock part is always tricky. It is doable, but really easy to have complicated bugs in it, and the open source versions tend to have said bugs. Preventing two people buying the same thing at once is hard.

Putting new items on the site should absolutely be doable for you. If he can't give you a decent interface for doing that, he's not a very good web designer, basically! That stuff is standard and there are loads of already-written tools for it.

awrylemming

My rather unpleasant ex used to do this to his customers to keep money coming in - it shouldn't be impossible to do this for you, that's what you're paying him for.

jeannette

What do you mean? That the product is no longer available for sale so that you don't sell it twice?

If that's the case, especially as it is a one off (i.e. you always sell in ones, so a purchase of 1 unit = gone), that should be pretty easy, but is obviously more complicated than doing nothing, right? Which is may be what he/she is preferring to do. The paypal integration can be a bit of a pain (it's certainly technical unless a pre-fabricated site skeleton/application that includes this has been used).

It is more difficult to determine that the customer has successfully completed paypal rather than going to paypal and failing and you probably only want to remove your stock if it's a successful paypal payment. Basically paypal is a 3rd party, so people leave your site and then would have to tell your site it's successful (or not). All the computer chit-chat is technical and is a pit of failure if you are responsible for the site - so the price can go up...

You could make it less complicated by assuming that the transaction was a success and making the item unavailable anyway and then checking paypal to re-list anything that was fraud/cancelled/etc.

All possible with the paypal APIs (the technical bit that connects things electronically if you aren't techie). But if your designer is either not familiar or new to do that, then maybe the price goes up, maybe if it is all code based with no database, these interactions are not possible, so database is needed to be hosted and the price goes up...I'm speculating.

Changing stuff on the site, it depends how the code is all hung together, but if everything is hard coded (sounds a bit this way since down dating stock is a problem) then it would be a case of you hacking (HTML or similar) code, uploading images and making sure it still worked, then troubleshooting or rolling back if it didn't. But you could almost certainly do it with instructions - he can, right? What you might find is that it becomes so time consuming that you start to eat into your margin because your price per item (man hours) now includes getting the product on the site to sell as well as crafting the item.
Alternatively and I don;t know what you agreed/paid for - he should be giving you a CMS (content management system) to do that yourself. I would have thought that was an absolute minimum.

If the site isn't going to do what you asked for, then it's probably not what you want - so maybe you say "no thanks, you haven't delivered a working solution (for me).", you know, if it's a commercial arrangement...

IMHO - I would do something with very little maintenance unless you already know how to do this or unless building and maintaining websites is what you really want to do/learn. You want glassification-gratification, right? :)

Hope that helps and doesn't sound negative - I do truly know it's all doable but you have to take the rough with the smooth - it will be harder work than an easy option (I think that's what they call a truism)!! From what you say, it sounds like he hasn't got a grip of your requirement...
Jeannette