Rasa Design Studio » Seven Stone eCommerce

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.

The Seven Stone eCommerce Project was conceived as an idea in the Summer of 2008 as an answer to the sometimes clunky nature of most eCommerce applications when dealing with the marketing and operations needs of growing businesses. At its heart, Seven Stone was supposed to be an easy-to-launch and easy-to-modify shopping cart application with some very effective SEO functions built in. As the idea grew and took shape, we realized that the application really could set a new standard for eCommerce designers, everywhere.

For most of 2009, we had to set the project aside as other responsibilities and projects demanded out attention, but over the past several weeks, the original proposal has been dusted off and serious thought has gone into making this a reality, after all.

This section of the site introduces the project and we’ll be launching a web site to focus on the development very soon… hopefully to attract talented developers to share in the project.

Introduction to the Seven Stone eCommerce Project

Concept of the application and business model

The 7Stone project will be developed with three separate versions that share the same core code: (Free) Open Source, Premium, Enterprise. The intent is find a balance between the rich development community needed for any eCommerce application to survive and thrive, and in finding the economic motivation to support development and continued support of the application once it’s in use. Rasa Design Studio will be the initial incubator of Seven Stone with the intent that 7Stone as a company will be spun off on its own.

The mission is to create a versatile eCommerce application that’s easy to launch and design for, yet provides rich support for the operations, sales, marketing and other business needs of growing businesses.

The extensibility and usability of the application should be as easy as WordPress’s Plug-in architecture and should appeal to designers with little or no PHP experience. Interfaces should make dealing with large numbers of products, customers, orders and staff employees as easy as possible. The front (public) side of the site should adhere to the best in marketing practices with the understanding that those practices will change over time.

Support for the application should also extend to strong support for businesses, in general: 7Stone should be a hub for information on how best to use the application and how best to grow businesses that use 7Stone.

Specs and Technical Considerations:

• Programming Language: PHP 4+
• Server: Linux / Apache
• Database: mySQL
• Output: XHTML (Tableless Structure)
• Other Scripts and Markup: Javascript, Ajax, XML, XSL, CSS, DHTML
• Default Store Types: Retail Delivered Products
• Other Store Types by Module: Retail Downloaded Products, Reservation, Subscription

7Stone As A Business

The expected cost to develop the Seven Stone was calculated at around $80,000 – $120,000 when it was planned with only the “Enterprise” version in mind and the sale of each application was originally considered to be part of a bundled design and programming “service” that we’d be offering to our own clients. The open source and community version of the business plan changes the calculus quite a bit and the cost of R&D is going to depend quite a bit on the talent we’re able to attract to the project on a volunteer and “profit share” basis.

We’ll be releasing the public version of the plan in the weeks to come. Please feel free to contact us if you’re interested in any aspect of this or any other of our projects.