I am creating an ecommerce site for a publishing company that at any given moment is selling over 1000 physical products. I have been told by some to use Wordpress and WooCommerce, however everyone at the company is very keen on the site I have made thus far in RapidWeaver. Magento is my preferred e-commerce platform and I was wondering what sort of work it would take to be able to use Magento in a RapidWeaver site, if its at all possible. am I condemned to either Ecwid or cartloom?
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You will need to make sure that your Magento installation is on the same domain if you want the height to work on the iFrame. As long as you are self hosting it then this should not be a problem.
There is a ton of information online about running Magento in an iFrame (which is what the stack does) - I’d check that first.
When you say at any given moment they are selling over 1000 physical products, do you mean they are averaging 1000 active orders at any one time or listing on average 1000 products?
If the later, I’d suggest RW might be the platform for the job, but personally I wouldn’t go there; if someone is listing 1k of products it’s entirely possible their online e-commerce platform is going to be mission critical, as such, leveraging a platform into a RW site, no matter how it’s done, is going to fall over sooner or later. And when it does, they are going to come to you to upload the products to a more suited solution. And of course, compensate them for the lost business as their RW site slowly dies a horrible death.
I do a lot of retail websites for clients in RW, but I’d never touch anything with more than a few hundred products. This comes on the back of 15 years personally running a reasonably sized online retail business.
If the former, RW is most definitely not the job, you need something massively scalable and robust with a rock solid backend. Almost none of the regularly talked about e-commerce platforms will cope with that sort of thru-put, your client will be needing something extremely efficient with a serious secure server powering it.
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at the moment the revenue generated from website sales is a very small percentage of the businesses income. as its a company i’m taking over and my focus is on massively expanding the digital presence and revenue generated through digital aspects I have the benefit of not being pursued if it were to crash and burn. my reason for not going straight to Wordpress is the idea of the website is more focused on building brand awareness, at the moment the commerce aspect is very secondary and there are very few sales that run through this channel, none the less I need the entire product catalogue on there so we have a sales channel where we can analyse data from the sales to build up a marketing profile and hopefully make ecommerce a much larger profit generator for the company. im certainly not opposed to platforms like shopify and Wordpress/woocommerce. however the ability to make a bespoke website for a company that specialises in very niche and premium publications is much more important than the ecommerce aspect as its very much a marketing focused exercise and the sales from the website are unimportant for the time being. it might be the case if it becomes a profitable sales channel that I utilise the companies resources and have something hand coded that gives me the best of both worlds, as it stands I just need a way to integrate a e-commerce platform that can offer me a product catalogue of that size that delivers a great user experience to the few who are currently purchasing through this channel. the annual turnover is over 3 million and I believe this financial year just £30,000 of that came from sales on the current website.
Is there a specific stack you recommend?
You’ve typed a lot above but not really said much, so it’s really difficult to make any meaningful comments or offer any advice. If you can post again and focus on what is needed from the website, it might be possible to help, but at the moment I’ve no real understanding of what you actually need, or want.
Apologies, I should have been more specific
The e-commerce side of the website, whilst having a large amount of products, is as it stands not an important sales channel for the business. It generates little revenue in comparison to the rest of the businesses activities hence why I didn’t go straight to one of the known and effective ecommerce solutions.
I need e-commerce in the website, whatever form it takes, it may be that I have to go to Shopify or wordpress/WooCommerce or magneto. But I’m hesitant to move away from rapidweaver in this instance as it’s more important to have a bespoke, informative website that showcases the business and builds brand awareness, rather than an excellent e-commerce site that will drive online sales (although I will still need e-commerce)
The aim at some point in the not too distant future is to make e-commerce a large revenue stream for the business, which is why I’m at such a loss with what to do. I’ve heard multiple times use wordpress and WooCommerce and stay away from RW with e-commerce on this scale. I could be wrong but I don’t believe that any of the dedicated e-commerce platforms would allow for me to make a website with the level of polish, individuality and information of the rapidweaver site I have made. Then on the flipside, rapidweaver doesn’t seem to offer from what I’ve heard, an e-commerce solution that will continue to be stable and offer a good customer experience as and when I decide to scale and drive more sales through that channel.
Cartloom and Ecwid have good integration but from what I’ve read in the community they won’t cut it when this website becomes a more important sales channel, so what I’m really wandering is, are there ways to have these highly regarded and fit for purpose e-commerce solutions like woo commerce or magento integrated in a rapidweaver page in such a way that it won’t compromise the overall quality and user experience.
@guypuggers123 Have you used the link @Webdeersign provided? That seems to be a perfect solution: the WP Embed stack where you can use WooCommerce while still designing more “regular” pages with RW. Seems to be a win-win for your needs.
My original post asked a crucial question - are you going to host the Magento site inside the exact same domain as the RW site - i.e. can you interlace them on your host.
The WPEmbed and consequent wooCommerce solutions offered purely rely on an iFrame on the same host which allows the height to be set by the host page. This is just a basic iFrame behaviour.
Assuming that you can host both sites on one domain then you need to ask yourself if you need to be GDPR compliant. If so then you will need to work out how you are going to handle cookie warnings and options if people hit the product page directly - i.e. without it being inside your iFrame host site.
On this matter, you will also need to work out whether you are bothered that people will not be able to get back to or even know about your site if they hit a product URL directly.
Theses are just a couple of serious issues with iFraming a partial site (i.e. a stripped shop / product database) but there are many more.
The message is therefore simply to do some research and think about the various consequences. Personally, I am not convinced that this is a sensible solution for eCommerce.
I meant it more of a developing area of interest that to be cautious, as you should be, may someway off a viable solution at this stage, rather than a perfect solution.
My advice would be to define the eCommerce system that you will require in 12 months plus. Then chose the Commerce solution and then chose a page builder to build it. RW is just a page builder really.
I would say you are wrong here. There are plenty of ways to build effective and great looking websites that support great eCommerce solutions.
There you go, you’ve answered your own questions.
Two options…
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Build the site in RW, embed a store into it somehow, have someone add those 1000 plus products, and then, in the not distant future, do it all again, adding those same 1000 plus products in the platform that can scale.
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Build now in the platform that can scale.
With my eyes, there really is only one option, and it’s not option one!
Maybe you’re new to e-commerce, maybe not, but generally speaking, the most time-consuming aspect of an e-commerce site is not building the store and making it look pretty, it’s adding the products.
RW is great for static sites, or sites with a modicum of “CMS”, be that a store, blog, whatever. But the end result will never have the scalability it sounds like you’ll need. So pick an e-commerce platform now that does what you want it to in the not too distant future and run with it from the off.