Egg Basket
My very talented fiance has just released a new eCommerce platform called Egg Basket and I’d like to tell you about it.
Egg Basket began a couple of years ago as I struggled to find an eCommerce platform that I could use to run Strawberry Moonbeam. I tried a few existing platforms but I wasn’t happy with any of them. A wordpress plugin I used broke when I tried to update it. Magento and a few others I looked into had such complicated admin panels that it was difficult to add new products.
The main problems that I had with the platforms I tried were the admin panels. They were a monstrous jumble of product management and store set up options. Once the store was originally set up, the store set up options were irrelevant to me, yet they seemed to be the main focus of the admin panels, especially with Magento. Adding new products required me to wade through so many options that I didn’t need, and spotting the ones I did need was quite difficult. I felt that even adding products was expected to be part of the original store set up and should be left well alone.
What I wanted was a simple, easy to manage store that only showed me the administration options that were relevant to me. I wanted to be able to easily add and update products, since what I make is usually one of a kind. I had sold on Ebay and Etsy before, and wanted a similar style of product management. I also wanted some quirky features, for example the images for the categories should be taken from one of the products currently for sale within that category. This didn’t seem to be possible with most of the platforms I had tried.
My other half, the web developer behind QWeb, had been working with Magento and some other eCommerce platforms and like me, found them excessively complex and difficult for his clients to use. He had been thinking about building his own store engine for a while. He started working on it with the promise that I’d have a fully working, bespoke eCommerce website within a fortnight…
About a year after he started working on his store engine, I was finally able to launch my new store. It had all the features I wanted, it pulled category images from currently available products, showcased newly added products, and most of all had a very simple admin panel that only showed me options relevant to actually running the store.
Another year has passed and after a lot more work there are a few more stores running on the Egg Basket platform. It has grown from a single store that met my particular requirements into a fully featured eCommerce platform that anyone could install and run even without much technical know how. It has new features such as automatic currency conversion and a powerful discount system.
Egg Basket is currently available to web developers and agencies with a license to create and sell eCommerce websites to their clients at Egg-Basket.com. You can also try out the online demo to learn more about the platform and its features. Individuals interested in setting up a website for themselves or having one created for them should contact Richard for a personalised no obligation quote.
