It’s worth noting that almost all the ecommerce solutions in this section are based on databases. That means you will have electronic records of your inventory, orders and customers. It may be though, that now you are on the road to online riches, you start getting one or two fancy ideas in your head like adding personalisation to your site or community building features or even just trying to collect some more information on your customers.
As your confidence grows, don’t be scared to research what customisation can be done to your database. Databases, as with programming languages, are pretty standard affairs. If you can find someone with the relevant skills, a bit of customisation is never out of reach.
You will need to decide what new data you want to collect. Your solution will aready have a standrard database schema that stores the relevant data in tables. There will be a seperate table for each data type i.e. a customer delivery address table, a product details table, a supplier discount code table. You may be able to add new data fields to an existing table or you may have to create new data tables to store the additional info. The software code will need checked and re-written in probably more than one place to ensure that these new tables and fields are understood and recorded by the software.
It is important to understand the constraints. Licensed software may not be supported if you make changes or changes may cause problems when you upgrade to newer versions. However, a professional programmer will identify these issues and will always back up your site and develop ‘tweaks’ in a test environment. You will find that with Open Source solutions ‘tweaks’ are almost encouraged as well as shared amongst user groups. It is human nature to experiment and explore. It’s experimentation and exploring that helped get the Internet established in the first place!
Each ecommerce solution will normally only use one type of database. It may be though that the solution is compatible with more than one type of database allowing you to choose which type to use. The common database types you will encounter are: mySQL, Microsoft SQL (MS SQL), MS Access, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase.
