It is for a small business, looking for the best solution... Did a search and only came up with very specific question related to ecommerce
May be worth taking a look at http://shopify.com/
OSCommerce is a well proven, free ecommerce solution, which is easy to set up
You might also consider just opening up an eBay store :) That way you essentially get free advertising, search engine indexing etc.
I always suggest that a company that is very small start with an open source solution such as DashCommerce. This way you get the development experience of the people supporting that project, plus the tested framework that many other companies are already using. The more people that use the code base the more reliable it is. Also, the more plugin type features that it might support such as tax, shipping, etc.
Take a look at DashCommerce's feature list to get an idea of what a complete ecommerce system should have.
Yahoo! Stores has one of the easiest ecommerce setups and has low upfront costs. The ongoing fees is how they make their money, and it becomes expensive with more volume.
Related
I'm looking to track how many people on the web have made my software program file available for download without my permission.
I've thought of searching for my product name and file size to catch possible thieves.
Do you think a web search API is the best way forward?
EDIT: I plan to use the detection data for survey purposes.
There are web analytics companies which could probably help you more than a roll-your-own solution. Consider the companies that big music and film vendors use, or check with the Business Software Alliance.
Ultimately, you are chasing your tail if you are looking to thwart piracy with the results of this kind of activity. However, if you are steadfast that you must try to understand what is going on, you need professional (web analytic) help. There are so many variations out there that you need someone experienced in tracking this kind of information, since you could easily get a false sense of security, or an inflated sense of activity.
No. This ultimately doesn't help you. What are you going to do? Send them emails tellings them to buy your software? Sounds like a spam filter will get it.
I would suggest in prevention rather than detection. A registration or activation process is pretty popular and reasonably successful, though if you have an amazing app it won't stop the really bad people from hacking it, however it will make it much more difficult.
We have over 100 applications in my company and we are trying to come up with a dashboard to show which applications use continuous integration and unit testing and other best practices.
I was going to put together my own database and a small website to start tracking this but first wanted to ask if there are any products on the market that allow you to track this.
Hmm, I will just throw this :)
We have smth similar on our company, we use inside wiki for that, there are list of our software and each responsible developer can comment it, is it using Unit Testing, little documentation attached, maybe an screenshoot, class diagram, a bit of design review. You can customize it as you want. No difference where it will be, on wiki, database, whiteboard, spreadsheet, the most important think is that ppl will have possiblity to edit that, and they will use it.
I really think a custom database with a pretty front-end is your best bet. Hell, a spreadsheet would even do the trick.
Whiteboard.
$41.29 on Amazon
The team I'm part of manage a number of software projects - and most of the stuff we do is end to end, from requirements tracking, to project management to purchasing and setup - a big pain is tracking of financials as we have a whole process to go through for our financials. At the moment we use a spreadsheet and store all the invoices and purchase orders in a shared folder. Its difficult to capture expenses and relate them back to projects that are ongoing or completed. Anyone got better ideas? Hope this topic is relevant.
I'm just throwing this out there but Scrum seems like a methodology that might lend itself to tracking this kind of stuff easily.
I use the time tracking aspects of JIRA with a bunch of custom fields that let me note issues as having been billed for (complete with storing the invoice number details against the JIRA issue). It's easy to relate hours worked to time billed. Might not work if you're billing for functionality rather than hours, but for $/hr work it's perfect.
You're talking about bookkeeping. Your best bet is probably to talk to accountant who organised books for a software company before. Alternatively you could read up on bookkeeping basics.
This question is not strictly software development related, although software business has some traits that make it different, i.e. absence of raw materials.
Best of luck with your question, I personally find it interesting, but I don't believe it belongs on stackoverflow.
you could try http://projectsputnik.com This software combines project management and billing
If you are using Jira, you can try Clerk — Invoicing and Billing for Jira app. Jira has projects and time tracking feature and this add-on does the invoicing and billing on top of that. I hope that helps.
How about using a wiki, something like Confluence? And then you can export to a spreadsheet. and import back again...
It seems to me that if you are writing in an interpreted language that it must be difficult to sell software, because anyone who buys it can edit it/change it/resell it without much difficulty.
How do you get around this? I have a couple of PHP apps that I'm reluctant to sell to people as it seems that it's too simple for them to change/read/edit/sell what I've produced.
Hardly anyone sells code. We sell the ability to create, edit, support and understand the code.
As a potential buyer of your application, I might find these features attractive:
The ability to change the code to suit my needs
The ability to read the code to better understand what it's doing
... and yes ...
The ability to sell my modifications
All three of those are features.
The third one might be a feature you can't afford to give me. Fix that through legal measures, not technical measures. That's what licensing is for. You could also sell more expensive licenses which do allow resale.
There are things you could do to remove the first two features, but bear in mind that in doing so you are reducing the overall value of your product to some people, and therefore its sale price.
For many people the primary reason for using Open Source software is not that it costs nothing -- it's that you get the source code.
People sell the service of creating web sites all the time. Also, even a compiled language can be altered, it`s just more difficult.
Most of the time the user base does not understand how to make the changes or what to do with the scripts so you are really selling your knowledge of how to install and change the scripts.
Don't sell the software, sell "licences".
I'll try to explain better, build the web app but provide hosting for it. this way your client will never get to "hold" the source code.
If you really must deliver the source code, Obfuscating is the way to go ;)
Possible routes to go:
Translate to a bytecode, binary or an obfuscated format
For instance, Splunk is written mostly in Python, and distribute bytecode. The EVE online client uses Stackless Python to compile to an executable binary.
Host the solution yourself
Put up a website, charge for use.
License the software
They get the source, but cannot legally modify or redistribute the source.
Open source the solution
Anyone can change the code, but you are the de-facto authority on it, and you can earn money by selling support, consultancy and customization services.
You could also consider a combination of approaches. E.g., partition your solution into several stand alone packages, and then open source some of them, and sell bytecode versions of other parts. What you then sell is the complete solution, as well as other services, and some people may benefit and enhance other parts of the solution.
Plenty of companies make money off of applications in interpreted languages and happily distribute the source code with them. Don't take this personally, but your program probably isn't going to be popular enough to have a large following of pirates. And anybody who would pirate your software probably isn't going to buy it in the first place. If they can't pirate it, they'll pirate somebody elses.
Whatever you do, please don't obfuscate your code. It's not an effective means of preventing infringement and it won't do anything other than make life miserable for you and your customers.
Protecting your secret bits is getting more and more difficult.
IMHO, your solution really depends on your target market. If you are targeting business, just give them the code with a good license, and possibly some type of defect so you can determine who gave your code away if that ever happens. Businesses will mostly pay for your app just to stay compliant; it's not worth the legal hassles. And if an individual gets your app for free, that's probably a good thing, since they will try to convince their current and future employers to buy it.
If you are targeting individuals, and can do it as a web app (which you obviously are with PHP), do it as a hosted service, and either sell a monthly subscription or allow free access and find another way to monetize it.
If you definitely need to or want to distribute it to individuals for whatever reason, you can give it away for free, and try to monetize customizations, add-ins, & other support features.
This is a problem that's been discussed a lot, and a few hours’ worth of really focused googling should reveal all the current philosophies on this.
I hope this helps.
Obfuscation may be a good way to go
With PHP you have the option of using the Zend Guard for PHP. I believe it compiles the source code in a way similar to what the php interpreter does,
so it should also increase performance. Of course the price of $ 600 may be too much for your liking ;-)
Anyway, I see no reason why you shouldn't distribute your code with an open source license (see the Open Source Initiative for a list of licenses available). You can find one that prohibits your customer from redistributing your app.
EDIT:
As Novelocrat points out in his comment, a license that prohibits distribution is per definitionem not an Open Source license, the term Open Source refers to a lot more than just the availability of the source code. (See also the answers to this related question for further discussion).
I'd like to develop an ecommerce site where I could allow others to sell items, things like pictures, videos, flash, etc. I want to be able to keep a percentage, and pay the rest back to the seller.
Is there anything available, DotNetNuke, etc. that would do this or help get this started. If not what's a good way to approach this with the goal to avoid upfront time and cost.
I'd like to think there would be some revenue that could be reinvested over time, so might grow into something that has some cost after a while.
You should have a look at osCommerce.
I'd take a look at Shopify if you want something with a minimum of development time, otherwise, if you have some development budget, why not take a look at Spree.
You could use DotNetNuke, or another similar framework if you have additional content that you need to include other than the shopping.
If you went with DotNetNuke, you could look at the Catalook store which I believe supports your desired format for selling. It isn't perfect, but it does work, eventually with a little experience. Otherwise ASP .NET Storefront might have what you need as well, either in a DNN based version or their standalone.
You could use WordPress, or another similar framework if you have additional content that you need to include other than the shopping.
If you went with WordPress, you could look at the Catalook store which I believe supports your desired format for selling. It isn't perfect, but it does work, eventually with a little experience