Before Christmas a good friend of mind, Rachel, asked me if I could help her set up a website for a business she was starting selling antique silverware (Argent Antiques) . Rachel needed the site to offer a standard set of e-commerce features where she could add and amend products and content on the site.
The software developer in me immediately starting thinking about how I could build her a solution. I was thinking that I could develop the site using ASP.NET MVC 5, Twitter Boostrap, Braintree payments integration etc. then then I thought, STOP, what are you doing? This isn’t a fun software development project, and Rachel certainly didn’t want to wait 3-6 months for me to lovingly hand craft the perfect e-commerce platform. She wanted a site up and running that fit her requirements in as short space of time as possible. After all, a site that isn’t live, is a site that isn’t generating revenue.

I took a step back and started looking at the different options available to me, these included :
- Develop a custom site in ASP.NET MVC.
- Use a CMS system like WordPress, Joomla.
- Use a SaaS (Software as a Service) eCommerce solution like Shopify or Wix
The option that I selected is based heavily on the circumstances and restraints that I was working within. For example, I was asked to produce this site as a favour to a friend, which meant I was going to be working on it in my spare time. I have a full time career, plus I am a Dad to 2 kids, so spending a lot of time on a solution would be an overall constraint. Plus from Rachel’s perspective, she wanted to get a version 1 website out there as soon as possible. The screen shots of the site in this article are our current version 1.0, quick to market version of the site that is fully functioning.
Here are some of the Pros and Cons I used as part of the selection process.