e-commerce

A few weeks back, J was asked by a friend if he could create a website for her to sell her cakes. He said yes without batting an eyelash, trying to exude the confidence of an employed IT professional. But deep inside, he knew he should be hitting myself for saying yes.

J recalled to me his days as a first year IT student. One of the first big projects they had was to create was an online store. This was to give them an idea of how object oriented programming is used to create software components that mimic a complete e-commerce cycle. He clearly remembered how tedious, complex, and very time-consuming it was because they were coding from scratch and arguing about everything related tp the project. Now, he says, it is like reliving the same nightmare except this time, he's all alone.

However, in the midst of his depression, he remembered the first advice their professor told them.

Don't reinvent the wheel. Nick others' code.

Now that does not sound very creative at all. It even borders on something criminal. But, according to J, in the IT world that is given some decent names like reusability, open source, etc.

This prompted him to do some research on the net and have found some sites that practically saves you from all that trouble. One is Ashop Commerce. The company provides a complete ecommerce software solution that can be integrated with major banks, gateways and third party processors like PayPal. To him, that means less headache and more savings in time and money. Plus with all its features and technical support, he is confident that our friend's website would look and function like any professionally made websites out there.

Lesson learned! Before saying yes, make sure to do some research first because next time, one might not be as lucky.