Quote:
Originally Posted by Black Rhino
Lawrence, because we are using an e-shop package, there is no way we can edit any html as these are ready made templates.
I'm interested in your comment about avoiding Lycos or any other packages. The reasons you give are valid but surely around 80-90% of all e-shop owners have absolutely no knowledge of html or website building from scratch (myself included) so have to rely on these ready to go options, whether they are from lycos, 1 & 1 or anyone else?
Obviously I would love a contingency plan because as you say, anything could happen. Lycos give you the option of exporting all your product details, pictures, data, etc to an excel file. Whether this could be used to import to another package I don't know.
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I'm very surprised that Lycos haven't given you FTP access to your site, some of their hosting plans do. Can you not even access the files via a web based file manager?
I don't know what the ratio of the use of all in one ecommerce solutions to stand alone packages is. The majority of people I deal with tend to be ex (or existing) eBay, Tazbar, eBid etc traders who frequent their forums. The most common ecommerce solutions they use are ZenCart, OsCommerce, CRELoaded and Actinic, the first three are free, Actinic is commercial. MrSite, another all in one package is also quite popular, though this has the same disadvantages as Lycos, 1&1 etc.
You don't need HTML, PHP knowledge etc to run one of the other stores, it helps but isn't a necessity, though you will pick up bits and pieces as you go. As Kate said, Tinkerbell is the perfect example, she jumped in with no knowledge and is now importing stock and planning to open a real B&M shop to complement her website.
The exported Lycos excel file should be able to be imported into other apps with a bit of tweaking. There's an add-on for Zen called EZPopulate which helps with importing data from other stores. You "should" be able to use your Lycos data in the ecommerce application of your choice. Worst case scenario is that you would have to copy and paste the data into their respective fields. I searched a few forums to see if anyone had tried this with a Lycos store, though all I could find was some people who had attempted to install Zen on Lycos hosting.
My suggestion to anyone looking for an open source store is to use ZenCart, if you're willing to wait a bit then hang on for the production version of Magento to be released (expected Q1 2008). If you'd rather use commercial software and therefore have backup from the company that created it, then checkout the likes of OpenMind or Actinic.