The Seven Stone eCommerce Idea
Seven Stone eCommerce is still vapor-ware at this point as several structural points are being hammered out. That said, the feelers put out on this project have generated a huge response, so I felt obligated to clarify the project a bit more.
In general, Seven Stone eCommerce is an answer to clunky “shopping cart” applications that emerged before the needs of shop owners was fully understood. While current applications have grown in power and sophistication over the past several years, they are often Frankenstein monsters built on a core architecture that predate Ajax popularity and sometimes, as in the case of osCommerce, even predate the power of Google.
Seven stone, then, was conceived, not merely as a shopping cart eCommerce application, but as a ‘business’ application with the ’shopping cart’ as only one key component of a larger, online business. Storefront design, marketing, operations, sales, customer relations management, Human Resource, shipping and receiving and other ‘divisions’ of a modern, growing business should be contained under one roof with all elements able to talk and interact with all of the other elements.
Whether a business starts out as a single owner-operator business, or a financed company with hundreds of employees, the framework for running all online business should be contained within a single framework and should be flexible and modular enough to grow with the business.
The idea has been there ever since my work integrating osCommerce with OrderMotion. A proposal written for Atria to study BlueNile.com’s usability and the rise of Ajax solutions has made Seven Stone eCommerce much more of a possibility. With frameworks such as Cake and Symfony, the actual building of Seven Stone has become the new priority of Rasa Design Studio.