Building a better niche store

January 11th, 2008 by Robert

Given my recent disappointment with BANS, I decided to build my own niche store builder. Well, after a few weeks of working weekends, a couple hours a night here and there I’m almost ready to deploy my first site using my new software.

What makes it special?

First and foremost, it separates the application logic from the templates. This was my single biggest complaint about BANS — far too much was embedded in PHP in the core application files. Being a professional software developer I couldn’t stand for that. So, first thing was to allow as much freedom as possible to build, and thus customize, templates as the user sees fit.

For those not intimately familiar with BANS or just use the default templates and default operation this may not be a big deal. But trust me, it is a big deal. What if you want to completely change how the menu is built? Have fun with that… What if you want to build your own search box? Yeah, good luck. How about completely changing how the products are listed? Happy searching.

These are all items that are deep in the core PHP code and thus hard to change and you risk breaking your site by messing with the PHP code that you shouldn’t even have to look at in the first place. Yes, you will need some PHP skills, but it will be PHP embedded in the HTML not the other way around. Perhaps you want a custom looking menu. No problem really, you will be given the objects that represent the content categories and the store pages. From these you access the properties and build as you see fit. This is just one simple example, but the whole package is written this way. You have a set of objects given to you and you build the template as you see fit. All of the data (most as objects) that is needed is provided to you allowing you complete customization.

Speaking of templates

The first set of templates that will be provided will be very SEO friendly, with content order precedence using CSS based layouts. Most likely they will utilize the Yahoo! UI libraries, namely the grids component for layouts and the reset CSS library as well. Note that using the Yahoo! stuff is not a prerequisite for building any template, I just happen to like them and the admin interface uses the same libraries.

Out of the box I’ll probably provide the basic half dozen or so combinations to account for two column, three column, fixed width, fluid widths, etc. Then I might throw in one or two special templates just for geewiz sakes

The big feature

It should have most of the features of the current 2.0 version of BANS with one big extra feature. That extra feature is the ability to view an eBay item without having to go to eBay. So say you have a listing of items for a given category. All good and fine. Well, as soon the visitor clicks on one of the listings they are taken to eBay. What if they didn’t like that item? You hope they hit the back button and come back to your site, but let’s face it they have left and you have no other option. Maybe you will get lucky and they will browse around on their own using eBay’s search and eventually buy something thus giving you credit.

Well, with mine when they click on an item, it will show that item’s details within the site itself. It will have a “place bid” link or button where they can actually go and place their bid withing eBay. This way they are not taken from your site and away from what they were looking at, your listings.

SEO

Yes, it will use SEO friendly URLs. This goes for the site links themselves as well as links that end up going to eBay. So the visitor should never see a URL that points directly to eBay. Although, because you have the flexibility, you could do so if you so choose.

When it comes to category URLs, keywords and such, the admin interface will actually help you out. Let’s say you enter the eBay category number 11189, which happens to be Vintage Computing Products. So you put in the category number in the appropriate text field, and after you do the URL field, Title field and keywords fields will all get automatically populated for you. You can override these default values if you like, but it is a nice time saver.

Searching

The search functionality will also be improved in some areas. With BANS, the search is done via an HTTP POST, which means the only thing you see in your address bar is http://sitename.com/search. The problem with this is that the user can’t bookmark this search and it doesn’t show up correctly in analytics packages. If the user searches for Atari for example, it should show http://sitename.com/search/Atari. That way you will see that URL in your Google Analytics or whatever tracking software you are using.

Why does this matter?

Well, what if 80% of your visitors are searching for the same thing? Or variations of the same thing? That is very valuable information for you. You can use that info to target those keywords in ads or in content, or maybe make a menu item specifically for that search phrase for a better customer experience.

So when is it going live?

Honestly if I wasn’t so picky it would be done by now :). My hope is to have my first site up sometime this weekend perhaps (January 12-13). The major functionality is all there and with a few quirks is almost done. I need to do some polishing up of the admin interface and finish a couple things I don’t like, but that is just my finickiness really. I also need to actually do the graphic and CSS stuff for the test site. Right now it is about as plain as it comes, as in plain text…

Given that I’ll keep tweaking it as I go. Now, if there is any interest in this I’ll certainly move things along a lot quicker

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