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I am looking to develop a product catalogue site into a e commerce site. I was wondering if anyone could give me any tips on where to find documentation to help me achieve this.

I am new to the world of e commerce and want to no if there is a simple way to implement these features into a EE website. I no little about payment gateways, shopping carts and merchant accounts and how they relate to EE and this process.

Any help, links etc… would be greatly appreciate.

eCommerce is a big subject, and I am certainly no expert.  However, I have built a few small sites using the ExpressionEngine Simple Commerce module and PayPal and found it to be pretty straight forward.  You still need very strong UX and IA skills, but all the back-end magic is taken care of.

For more ambitious projects, you can go with something like FoxyCart .  The great thing about this is that there is third party company that takes care of all the integration between EE and FoxyCart - Foxee.

After quite a bit of research into this, I have decided to go with these two solutions on an upcoming project.

Many thanks for your reply. I assume IA is ‘Information Architecture’, what is UX?

User Experience - plenty of info out there on this subject.  In the case of eCommerce, a good user experience - e.g. sensible navigation, logical methods for sorting through the offerings, etc. - will greatly improve the odds of the visitor actually buying something!

Many thanks that is very helpful. Being new to e-commerce I get a bit confused with these terms and their meanings… Merchant Account ,Payment Gateway & Shopping Cart. I think I more or less understand their meanings…

Merchant Account - License by which you are permitted to accept payment by credit cards.

Payment Gateway - A vehicle of receiving online payment including that of credit cards.

Shopping Cart ... Not Sure?

Could you explain the meanings in relation to FoxyCart and how these terms fit with that software?

Merchant account is something you set up at a bank or PayPal - it is where the funds will be deposited.
Payment Gateway - third party services that handle electronic transfers between your eCommerce app and your merchant account.  Note that you can only use the ones supported by the eCommerce app.
Shopping Cart - essentially what is says.  Customers add items to the “cart” and then at some point “check out”.  Cart applications allow the user to view what they have selected, remove items, and see the grand total before checking out, amongst other things.  FoxyCart provides that functionality.

Hi Marker Maker,

When you sign up with a merchant provider (bank) they will have a payment gateway (API) for their service. FoxyCart handles the gateway to your merchant and PCI compliance.

The shopping cart is the code you insert in your templates that allows people to buy your products. Foxee provides a bridge between EE and FoxyCart allowing you to quickly and easily insert tags into your templates that create the shopping cart forms that get sent to FoxyCart for processing through your merchant provider.

We have a GUIDE that will help you understand all of the different aspects of setting up a store using Foxee/FoxyCart.

That’s great guys many thanks for your help.

So ... Is FoxyCart a payment gateway and shopping cart combined?

Payment Gateway - third party services that handle electronic transfers between your eCommerce app and your merchant account.  Note that you can only use the ones supported by the eCommerce app.

Whats an example of an eCommerce app?

This might help explain the gateway / merchant account / website / ecommerce app distinctions as well:
http://www.foxycart.com/gateways-merchant-accounts-bank-accounts-oh-my.html

FoxyCart isn’t a gateway or a merchant account.

Foxycart and foxee are awesome!!! Thanks Bret and Mike, I will be eternally grateful to you guys…

Foxycart definitely makes things a bit easier. Also of note is something that has been in beta and is prepping for release and that is cartthrob. it looks very promising.

Cartthrob is really good - it needs some templating and the learning curve is somewhat steep - not steeper than EE’s but the result is excellent.
You can customize almost everything - but the price you pay for so much flex is complexity.