A big reason that we are pursuing online businesses as opposed to physical stores is the relatively small amount of capital that is needed to set up shop. Our goal is to create the methods, systems, processes and marketing plans to launch a new business and have it supporting the owner within a year. Clearly we're talking a different language to the big boys. Netflorist have published a press release where they boast about their R3 million site redesign and system overhaul, apparently moving to Microsoft Commerce Server technology. I have to admit the site looks pretty good, and there is no doubt they are handling way bigger volumes than we are. But R3 million? If we had that type of cash we could hire 5 decent programmers and designers to work solidly for nearly 3 years. I wonder whether I could keep them busy for more than a few months?

At Live Alchemy we develop most of our website technology in-house (other than a few open source plug-ins or tools like Google Analytics), using PHP and MySQL, and hosting on Linux servers with Hetzner. We have explored various off-the-shelf and free shopping cart systems, but years of working on homegrown systems has given us a level of familiarity that is hard to give up. However, there is a lot to learn from other systems, so we will be reviewing and researching things like MS Commerce Server in months to come.

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