New E-Commerce Website in Progress

I have been looking for an alternative to the steep eBay fees involved in having a store, and listing auctions. Many of my fellow eBay Artists will relate to this situation. What to do? Hummm...maybe my own e-commerce website.

I had no idea how much work was required to create a full-blown shopping cart website, especially if you are picky about things like I am. I checked into the ready made stores, where you just up-load your products, but I didn't like the looks of any of the less expensive ones. The expensive ones were way out of my budget. So off I went to research "e-commerce" on Google.

What I found was that I needed a database driven website. SQL is the database part and PHP is the code that manipulates the data in your database. Lovely.

Html, like I use on eBay, is simple compared to this new language. A steep learning curve is involved. After many weeks, I am starting to get the hang of it. It is a scarry thing, though. I have been dreaming about php code!

Well, my new e-commerce website is starting to look pretty good. And as of tonight, everything is working properly. But, I'm not done, every time I make a change, I hold my breath and hope I don't get the white screen with the FATAL_ERROR message. Of couse, I've learned the the Fatal _Error message is no big deal, it just means I have one too many commas or I'm missing a parenthesis. An hour of digging through code and every thing is fixed.

It's still a work in progress, but I'd be pleased if you would take a look and let me know what you think. You can't buy anything yet, as the credit card module is switched off, untill I'm done tinkering. But I have a shopping cart that remembers what you put into it, even after you leave and come back; a customer Wishlist, customers can keep multiple addresses, write product reviews, and many more niceties.

So exciting!