eCommerce

There are quite some questions related to using/preparing a shop in combination with CMS Made Simple. This topic describes what options you have and how to install. Any tips and tricks will be discussed as well.

eCommerce suites available

There are two complete suites available:

• Calguy's suite;
• Duketown's suite.

A third suite would be eSShop but that has not been updated (coding wise) for a long time and doesn't work with versions later than 1.6.

Next to this there are solutions build upon modules like:

• Cataloger in combination with PayPal

Comparison of suites

Duketown did a presentation on the Geek Moot of 2010. Four solutions were compared and the result is as follows:

Legend: CS Calguy's Suite, Cat Cataloger in combination with PayPal, DS Duketown's suite, ES ESShop

The bigger the description, the more important the aspect.

• Red dot means it is not possible/out of the box;
• Orange is shown when possible but not really the intention;
• Green means good and working

With regards to the market of one of the suite. The main developer knows his/her area best and will try to push in as much as possible the customs and vat regulations that are in place for the part of the world he/she is working in. That doesn't mean that a suite with a US market is not usable in Europe and vice versa.

Looking to the suites from another angle the following is in place:

eCommerce sites using CMSMS

Using CS

• Restaurant with ordering facility
• Womens fashion accessories
• Cupcake ordering
• Rose Campbell's Cottageworks

Using Cataloger

• Soaps and Herbals
• Ordering site for photos

Using DS

• Golf GPS distance calculator
• Shoe covers
• Paintings (with mods on modules)
• An incredible nice mix of a flipbook (catalogus style) and popup cart handling

More documentation

There are books that describe the suites: For calguy's suite you should look at the book of Sofia Hauschildt, which can be obtained via the publisher PacktPub. This book is based upon the suite as available for the CMSMS 1.6 version. Multiple modules of this suite, have seen new releases which results that the book is behind in functionality description.

An installation guide of this suite can be found on Calguy's own site.

Duketown's suite has been described in the book available via:

• Digital version: shop from Duketown
• Printed version: via Lulu.com.

Both digital as well as the printed version are at least up to CMSMS version 1.9.

User Handbook/eCommerce

From CMSMS