
Originally Posted by
TheGAME1264, post: 251057, member: 428
Dude, I'd love to give you advice on this but the only advice I can give is that you're both in way over your head...you and your boss. I mostly blame your boss, though.
I'm going to put this to you bluntly: you wouldn't attempt to build a brick-and-mortar store of any sort without some knowledge of foundation, of flooring, of lighting, of where to put cash registers, of where to put the aisles, of how to organize content, of how to market, etc. E-commerce is no different, other than the fact that you don't have a large quantity of tangible assets with which to build the store itself. These things take years just to get the basics down, and even people who have built e-commerce sites for several years will tell you that they can't possibly learn or know everything. Chances are your boss wants something built fairly quickly, and with your level of knowledge, that's not going to happen. It just isn't.
Languages you'll need to learn (besides HTML/CSS):
Javascript would be useful, ideally jQuery
One of PHP, ASP, or ASP.net depending on what resources you have to set up the site and what databases you have to interact with
XML...you'll probably need this to interact with the various payment processing APIs (which is a chore all by itself)
How you learn them, and how long you learn them, will depend on you. There's no set answer to that question.
Create your own if you can, and if there are customizations that will need to be done specific to what you're selling. The third-party carts that exist are horrible, including Magento (which for some reason, people tout as the be-all and end-all of carts...it's garbage).
The best tip I can give you to help you out is to not take this on at all, or at least not all at once. Your boss probably figures that "it's easy enough for me to say what I want, so it should be easy enough for you to do what I want." It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. Reading through the documentation associated with a payment processor alone can take several hours, never mind days. And when you let him down, he'll see it as your fault when it's really his.
I'm not saying any of this to be negative or to rain on your parade. I'm just trying to give you a realistic set of expectations when it comes to what you've been asked to do. This is not a simple task, and you've never done anything like this before. So you're in a position that you can't succeed. Again, the best thing you can do is walk away from it, or at least significantly temper your boss' expectations.