hi, i want to be able to do ecommerce websites for people, but the only thing i know how to do right now is informational websites (just text and images with a contact form). i was wondering if there is anything out there that can do ecommerce for me on my website without knowing php. any help greatly appreciated. thank you . derek

In short, no essentially you asking if you can fix road without any equipment (it's possible, but ****ing hard).

I suggest you learn PHP, get a book on it (I suggest one from the Visual Quick start brand from Lary Ullman) it only takes about 1 hour to get the basics ( and from their you can do anything).

thank you very much rogem002 for that help. i know it was a stupid question in the forum of php, but i had nowhere else to ask. i do happen to be studying that exact book you mentioned. so i will have to learn php then. which i do consider to be fun, (when i understand it LOL). thanks again for being nice for my super newbie question. derek

Here is the book I essentially learned from:
PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide

A lot of hosts offer ecommerce add-ons. Sometimes at no extra cost even.

You might take a look at what your current host offers. If they don't, look around.

I know several people running ecommerce sites without having a clue what PHP or programming is. Typically, however, they use one of the commercial offerings.

In all cases, you have to live with what the package you choose offers. google is your friend.

Take a look at Magento or Zen-Cart, ecommerce packages you can download and install on your web server.

What kind of E-commerce application you are trying to start .. If it just need an online business and the products that you offer is limited then you can go for paypal .. which does not need to implement the basic stuff in your website .. And if you need a shopping cart then you can go for os-commerce or Zen cart ..

But its always good to have the knowledge of PHP

if you are want to setup oscommere and jencart on your site than it is very simple and you can set up for you within just a minutes. you have to knowledge basic only about how to install. w3cschool is the good tutorial where you can learn.

thank you everyone for those great helpful responses. my hosting provider does provide ecommerce, but i plan on being a web designer/php programmer for a living, so my best option probably is just suck it up and learn php. (sigh). but im glad i have this forum to go to when i have trouble. my goal in the future is to make a site similar to pricewatch.com, but it would be different in many ways, and my idea would be to take a 5% cut off of every sale. but that is a long way off from now. does anyone know where i should start if i want to start learning to program sites in php that can sell products and services? i think a basic ecommerce site is where i should start, but i could be wrong. last time i started trying to make a message board, but someone posted porn messages on it, and ruined it from that, and i had no way to secure it, i wasnt advanced enough, but any guidance on where to start as a newbie project going towards an ecommerce site that sells products and services would be greatly appreciated. thank you rogem002 for that book recommendation, im going to buy it. thank you. derek

Just to reiterate you will need some kind of server side language to build a shopping cart system, at least a secure one. It doesn't have to be in PHP naturally, but it should be server side.

I would encourage you to learn PHP (or another server side language), but you can still offer shopping cart solutions without knowing a language. There are so many open-source solutions that you could spend the time learning how to work with a few of them. Of course knowing PHP will likely help so yeah, you might as well learn it.

Look for books that teach both PHP/MySQL. The programming language is one part of the equation. The other part is a database. A lot of books will teach a shopping cart or a CMS as an example. One thing to keep in mind about your idea is that there are a lot of free solutions available so just having a cart isn't going to be enough to get people to use it. You're going to have to offer a good reason why someone should give you 5% of every sale, especially as the merchant handling the payment is going to want a few % as well.

Foxycart is a pretty cool solution for more basic shopping carts. You really don't need to know much to implement it. Here's a tut on how to use it.

http://css-tricks.com/video-screenca...for-ecommerce/

Originally Posted by rogem002

In short, no essentially you asking if you can fix road without any equipment (it's possible, but ****ing hard).

I suggest you learn PHP, get a book on it (I suggest one from the Visual Quick start brand from Lary Ullman) it only takes about 1 hour to get the basics ( and from their you can do anything).

I agree with rogem002, but did you ever try using a shopping cart script? It is php, but since my first attempt using php, I found that shopping carts (in the sense of e-commerce) have been simple to setup, and use. Just google php shopping carts, there are free ones such as oscommerce which has been around for ages. Give it a whirl and let us know how things turn out.