Heading Towards Ubercart

For the few of you following along at home, waiting to see what sort of eCommerce decisions we’re making with wiredchurches.com, we’re taking some steps towards using Ubercart.  There were a few driving forces behind this desicion.

• We are leaning towards open-source software in the first place for a couple reasons:
  1. Ease of customization/not locked into a product we can’t tweak
  2. Ability to hire a developer to create functionality we need (esp. a good event registration system)
  3. No yearly license fees

• Ubercart seems to have a majority of what we need built into the core package (others are missing vital pieces)
• I personally loved how they set up the Downloadable Products administration (some major products don’t even have an option for downloadable products yet.  See previous point, and earlier posts)
• Ryan Szrama (one of the developers of Ubercart) found an earlier post which sparked a dialogue that led to connecting with Mike O’Connor of the newly formed commerceguys.com
• In our first conference call, Mike pitched Ubercart well, plus he lives in Jackson, MI which would allow him to work with us in person whenever it would be beneficial

We met with Mike this past Friday.  Since he just lives a couple hours away, he drove down to spend 4 hours crammed into a small meeting room with all of us.  We threw a thousand questions at him, and I think he got a pretty good idea of how complex we want our system to be (he also answered the questions).

That’s it for now.  We’re waiting to hear if Mike is going to run screaming from this project now that he’s met us and knows more of what’s involved.