Back in 1999, there were basically two or three options, none of them good, if you wanted to run a store and didn't want to build the software yourself. You have Miva Merchant, and Yahoo Stores. Both sucked. Miva had this incredibly awful programming language that you had to use if you wanted to customize anything, and some things were just flat out unchangeable. You couldn't do complex pricing, you couldn't do promotions that were randomly selected, you couldn't do much of anything (even things like the catalog had to conform to basically one or two templates that stunk). Yahoo stores was even less customizable, and it was EXPENSIVE. Roughly 300-500 bucks a month, and the prices would go up the more items you listed AND they took a percentage of sales if memory serves. That was why I spent a considerable amount of time building my own software, which ended up preventing me from spending most of my time on the business, something that prevented the store from ever growing out of the hobby stage. Now that Sara wanted to restart things, I knew it would basically hinge on whether there was any good software out there that was open source, modifiable, and looked like it was well built. X-Cart, OS Commerce, and many other like them all sucked in my opinion for a variety of reasons, but MagentoCommerce seemed to be the ticket, and after going through the demo store, the code, and running an example engine, I was sold. They've done an INCREDIBLE job on putting out a solution that just works, is easy to customize, well built, and can just flat out be used as a platform. Even upgrading is mind-numbingly simple. You login, it alerts you to new software versions, and you click "upgrade", and it takes care of everything for you. As the technical backbone to Orient Products - the Traditional Chinese and Asian Handicrafts and Gifts Emporium (that's my tagline, not the official Sara-approved tagline, because this is MY journal) emerges, I'll keep a steady stream of posts coming that talk about the challenges, things I liked, didn't like, etc. about setting up the store.

Back in the dark old days of the internet, I started an "e-commerce" business.  I was fresh out of high school, the dot com boom was storming its way toward oblivion, and technology talk was everywhere.  I grew up in China, so I thought, why not become the Amazon.com of Chinese stuff?  China has tons of beautiful traditional artforms that are almost all handcrafted and I thought it would sell well. I was right, mostly. The problem was, I was in school, strapped for cash, there was almost no technology that was any good out there, and getting a real site up was expensive.  As in, 300+ bucks a month for a dedicated server, 100+ bucks a month for credit card processing, 50+ bucks a month for a cell phone, etc. etc. And I had to build the software.  So that's what I did, and I spent 99% of my time building software just so I could have flexibility and be able to run a "real" ecommerce site.  We built up a customer base, sold some stuff, but I never had the time to devote to it that was required in order to build the kind of business with the kind of product line that I wanted. Fast forward a few years, and now I'm married.  With a wife who's got impeccable tastes and enjoys fashion, someone who likes learning new things and wants to get things done, and is blessed with one or two (psychology and spanish) of those useless degrees.  So we take a trip to China to see the Olympics, and she comes back and announces that she wants to start up the business again. So here it comes: Unique Traditional Chinese and Asian Gifts and Handcrafted Items - Orient Products (.com) This ought to be fun.