eCommerce

[jimkemble]

I am a web developer in a small advertising company with very strong creative team behind me. We need to be able to offer eCommerce to our customers as we design and program websites. I have looked into CartWeaver plug in using ColdFusion but read questionable reviews so we need to find cart integration that will work for a company that has intermediate coding experience.
Jim

[Lawrence_Cramer]

Feel free to pop into our newsgroup and ask what the users thing of CW... I think you'll like what you hear.

news://support.cartweaver.com/coldfusion

--
Lawrence   *Adobe Community Expert*
www.Cartweaver.com
Complete Shopping Cart Application for
Dreamweaver, available in ASP, PHP and CF
www.twitter.com/LawrenceCramer

[Willem-A]

Hi,

Cartweaver is great, where did you read those bad reviews..??

Cheers,

W.A.

[katsueydesignworks]

Cartweaver has some limitations, but certainly is a very good ecommerce solution. I guess we would need to hear what it is that you need in an ecommerce solution to completely address your situation and whether Cartweaver is right for you. I do have one site that we are currently remodeling and updating from Cartweaver 1 to Cartweaver 3 in CF at http://dev.interiordecoratingshop.com if you'd like to see a store in action. I personally think Cartweaver is very good. It's easy for the non-programmer to install and fairly easy for a developer to extend its capabilities.

[Guest]

Hi Jim,

as a long time CartWeaver user (but not affiliated with the company in any way), I recommend it for any level of user. The strong points of the CW system are the ease of customization, the support of the community (including a wide range of available plugins and modifications) and the fact that it is all simple, unencrypted ColdFusion (along with regular html and css of course) which means even a basic-level CF user can  find his way to making it look and behave however is needed for any size project. Also, the price is incredibly cheap considering you can use it to build any number of sites. Not sure what other CF eCommerce options you may be exploring but don't cut yourself short on the basis of a few mixed reviews - as Lawrence said, connect your newsreader to the support newsgroups and ask any questions you might have , then judge for yourself. (We'll look forward to seeing you there!)

[jimkemble]

Thanks all for your encouraging comments.  I will continue looking closely at CW and try to sell the company owner on it. I want to explain my hesitation with pursuing CW with Cold Fusion.  First off, I would prefer CW with Cold Fusion  because I read that it is the easiest language to learn by building on previous html knowledge because it is tag based. I do have a little php experience, mostly the theory of "calling" in php snippets into an html page then saving page as php, also seeing php used in WordPress feeds. I do not know the actual php language well but only how to tweak what someone else built for me.

I understand that you can purchase CartWeaver in php or ColdFusion and it is the language that I am undecided about as well.  Some people are saying that ColdFusion is a dying language and if you are going to invest in learning a language to learn open source php.

Again, with my proficient html/css DW knowledge I would rather go DW with CF.  Do you agree DW with CF as a small design company's first endeavor into shopping cart the best route??  Then I will have to learn the licensing costs/ number of allowed sites/ etc.

Thanks again for the advice.

[katsueydesignworks]

Cartweaver comes in PHP, CF and ASP. I would agree with those that assess that CF is the easiest language to learn. In fact, starting with Cartweaver 01, I knew NO CF. I learned a lot about CF through the use of CW and then enhanced my knowledge with Forta's WACK. I should mention that Cartweaver 3 (the current version) is much easier to install on a web site, and IMHO requires no knowledge of CF unless you need additional features.

CF is NOT a dying language but this has been an argument said over and over for the last 10 years. CF 9 was just released in public beta along with a new CF IDE, showing that indeed Adobe is committed to CF.

Licensing: When you purchase Cartweaver, you own it. You may use it on as many website as you wish without further licensing. This is one of the reasons Cartweaver first interested me. I don't like purchasing "instances" of software.

Support for CF ( as already mentioned) is very good. Simply go to the CF forumn and ask your questions. In addition, Lawrenece has been known to respond privately to emails (including mine - thanks Lawrence!)  for further assistance and clarification on problems. He also writes an ecommerce blog http://blog.cartweaver.com/, reminding people of important events in the world of ecommerce, Cartweaver and Coldfusion.

[jimkemble]

Thanks again for the quick advice. I am currently watching the entire

Lynda.com title on CW using CF. I saw that CW contains an Access

Database. My next question to help me in the overall understanding

of eCommerce is the populating on the web store's database. From

watching the videos I believe that you do not upload a complete

database of products, prices, colors, short desc, long desc,etc BUT

rather that you need to product by product build the database. Am I

right in this assumption?

Thanks Jim

[DwFAQ]

As suggested several times already in this thread it may be best to post your Cartweaver-specific inquires in the Cartweaver forum.

[jimkemble]

OK sorry