Playing with the Lovely Items Prototype and Exploring Turnkey E-merchant Options

Fireworks, so far, has been a great tool to use to design the layout for the Lovely Items website.  I made a 3-page prototype complete with links to get a feel for how it will look and navigation.  So far I’ve discovered that I don’t like navigation at the bottom of the page, the red motif distracts from the items, and the gallery has too much emphasis on horizontal.  I like the cherry blosson motif for the main theme though, so I think I’ll see how I can work it without having the theme detract from the contents.

One another note, I’ve been doing some preliminary research into turnkey e-merchart options.  So far I’ve looked at services from Amazon, Yahoo, and Paypal.  The Amazon service looks like it would be the easiest to implement and it has some nice features to the help the business manage inventory.   This is probably the best option to protect the merchants and buyers from fraud, plus, the merchant shows up in Amazon searches which means they will have access to a huge available customer base.  The big draw back is the cost at $60/mo plus 7% commission and the Terms of Service which basically says “What’s Yours is Amazon’s” and Amazon can give your artwork and code to  anyone it wants.  There are also limitations with respect to what you can sell.  Basically,  Amazon makes it difficult for e-merchants to undercut Amazon on items that Amazon sells.   I couldn’t really tell what Yahoo was offering other than it being cheaper than Amazon.  Paypal has a a few different options that range from hosting e-commerce directly on the merchant’s website to having all purchases routed to Paypal via an API.  There’s also an option that looks like an hybrid in which the merchant’s customer is routed to Paypal only at the time of purchase.  It seems that Paypal is interested in skimming the pennies off each transaction through credit card service fees rather than from hosting the service all together.  My current inclination is to explore the Paypal options more thoroughly.  I also plan to check out the offerings from Go Daddy and maybe give Yahoo a second look.

You are probably asking what it is that I want to sell … hahaha … beyond the stated potential services … I do have my eye on something else as well .  My goal is to have this all going by the end of October independent of whether I’m employed (dear God I hope I’m employed by then…)

Anyhow, for now I will be concentrating on tightening up my HTML for searchability (doing a pretty good job so far ;p) and continuing to learn PHP and Javascript.  BTW:  Google will find Flash Objects if you make good use of the alternate text and naming the SWF.