Ubercart

Mavis asks,

I have already spent thousands of dollars on my [Zen Cart] website. What would be your advice for [a company] who wants to transfer their site to a new host but not redesign it?

Just like a physical store, the costs of running an e-commerce site very quickly exceed the costs of opening it. And any time you're handling money, you automatically become a target for thieves -- you need to take security seriously, or you're bound to get robbed.

Wesley at The Nubby Admin asks,

Drupal you say? I’m not too mid-stream to change horses if there’s a good reason to do so. If Ubercart has great digital content delivery features and the ability to sell URLs (and obfuscate the real directory structure), then I’d be all ears.

Oh, and your “About Freelock” page and subpages ROCK THE HECK OUT! =)

Damon Cortesi ( @dacort ) over at Untitled Startup recently wrote up a summary of recurring payment services provided for startups. It's a decent analysis of current payment services that offer a hosted recurring billing solution, if you don't have a merchant account or want to handle your own e-commerce. If you're writing a software-as-a-service platform from the ground up, and would like to outsource the payment side of things, these are good options.

Another large scale project by Freelock Computing, the Organic Materials Research Institute tested our abilities to work with a variety of sources and the Drupal system. The project brought their old public facing website built on PHP to the Drupal CMS and is still synced nightly with their internal master database built on Access.

We've built custom shopping carts, as well as implemented several different open source shopping carts, including Zen Cart, OS Commerce, VirtueMart with Joomla, and Ubercart in Drupal. We've also built SOAP servers to allow manufacturers to take orders from distributors. We've built payment gateways for several of these systems, and imported products and images from other content management systems and existing online stores.