This is the secont part of the post regarding the perspectives of e-commerce flash solutions. Here I am planning to give a short overview of market demands and some technical aspects.
Who may want flash shopping cart?
Before the development of flash shopping cart it would be a good point to make some sort of market research and find out who may want flash shopping cart and what are the major demands to the software. According to our internal company statistics the customers interested in flash ecommerce solutions may be the retailers of home appliance, cell phones, computers, clothes, food, beverages and all the range of things that can be easily delivered by post services Like FedEx of DHL or whatever. Also we should not forget about digital goods, online services and photographers. So as you see the number of potential customers is really huge. I would assume that online shops, delivery services and big stock shops all together will make the life of supermarkets really hard pretty soon.
Technical Demands to the final product.
Now let’s outline some technical, design and usability demands. As we aim at small and middle business we should realize that flash shopping cart must be very cost effective, easy to install-run-update, customizable and inexpensive solution. To avoid additional software expenses we recommend to use XML data feeds to store information about the products and shopping cart design settings. This allows not to involve qualified personnel with web design experience to install and customize flash shopping cart software. Also XML feeds allow to store relatively extensive arrays of information and to process them robust. To keep the cost of the product as low as possible we recommend to use ecommerce flash templates or even better ecommerce flash components which can be integrated into any existing flash based or css based website. Using flash components gives a chance to keep the initial expenses at the level of $30-70 which is more than affordable in comparison with custom solutions.
As a conclusion we may say that the most effective flash e-commerce solution is XML driven flash cart component that can be integrated into any existing website.
Possible Architecture.
At the moment we have several ideas regarding general architecture of ecommerce flash website. The 1st and less expensive variant will be so called “components based flash website” which consists of the main core that loads all pages together and defines general look and feel and the pages itself. These flash site pages will be usual components with dynamic content, 1 component per 1 page. Such flash websites will cost in the range of 30-50 USD, the admin panel won’t be included.
Another more expensive yet functional variant will include advanced flash CMS for content and sales management and complex structure based on XML data files. The prototype of such flash ecommerce solutions may be FancyCMS and ReadyPhotosite engine(in fact it was created for the photographers but can be easily reconfigured for other purposes).
General Conclusion. Our team believes that in the nearest future we will see lot’s of Flash E-commerce site engines and the competition will be really rough. Same events we predicted in our reviews of Flash CMS Websites and if you are following up the topic you can notice that 99% of our assumptions were correct.