Building a site to sell virtual/digital products

[bhupendra2895]

Hi,

Recently I started to develop my first ecommerce site for myself using zend framework, development went smoothly untill I reached to the implementation of shopping cart.For this I decided to download magento and give it a try because it is built on zend framework.Magento Community edition is a good shopping cart and I love the features it offers.But being a developer I am very confused should I use magento or not.
If I do start to use magento my site will be a module of it or it will be a module of my site?
Is it really a good choice to use a shopping cart which stores 318 table in database?
I have developed a customer authentication system(ZEND_ACL, ZEND_AUTH) in my site and other things but I think I need to understand e-commerce site standards to develop my own secure shopping cart.

Since some of you are experienced developers can you suggest me what should I be doing in such kind of situation?

Thanks,

 

[dstravelwriter51]

I know I'll probably get yelled at for replying to such an old post, but my take on this is 2 things:

1) You can try to sell things on X10 (if that is where you sell them from) but it might not work since X10 is shared hosting (far as I know) and thus you won't be allowed to take card payments (the card co.s disallow use of shared hosts).

2) you need SSL to propery run a shopping cart that customers and clientele will trust. Shared hosts, due to their setup, usually cannot provide SSL.

Sorry if this is a tad confusing, or if I got my facts wrong. I'm still new to e-commerce as well. Although, if I am allowed to recommend something, I'd say, use Paypal's API (or AlertPay, Cash.ru, etc, depending on where you do business legally) to process payments made by customers paying for items which you put up on some blog (which I presume you own the blog and have legal right and title to sell said items).

Paypal has SSL and is not a shared-hosted site.

Hope this helps,

Drake.

 

[bhupendra2895]

Thanks for your suggestion but I don't have any account in x10 and I know that to get a valid ssl certificate I need dedicated IP.If I don't store any sensitive data in a shared hosting environment than I can use any of the payment gateways you suggested.Among them paypal is popular but it is not allowing Indian users to store any money in their account because of the guidelines of reserve bank of India.Therefore Indian users cannot buy anything using funds in their paypal account.I am not only confused with the platform for development of this site but also with payment gateways.Paypal was best but it is not currently suitable for Indian users and my site's primary target is India.Google Checkout only offers merchant accounts only for uk and us publishers.Alertpay, moneybookers are not very popular.I am not able to find any free payment gateway that can be friendly for Indian market.

Well, this is a minor obstacle but major obstacle is to decide which kind of approach I should adapt to design an e-commerce software.

 

[cybrax]

Have you looked at http://www.opencart.com/ ?