This weekend we unveiled a brand new eChef store. This project has been the focus of my attention for a while now, and I’m really happy to finally have it live.
Previously, we were using Zen Cart for our store, which is a fine e-commerce solution in its own right, but was simply not designed with our type of business in mind. With no physical goods to ship, and only one product in our catalog, it was overkill in most respects. Rather than hack it into something more our style, we decided to start from scratch.
One of our biggest issues with Zen Cart was that it required visitors to create a customer account and go through multi-step process to make a purchase. The new store has exactly 1 step. The page that you see when you go there? That’s the only page. When you put in your address, your tax is calculated and updated automatically. Clicking “Buy now” completes your order and mails a receipt. That’s really all the functionality we needed.
Just like eChef itself, the store design was heavily influenced by the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid). So it’s not surprising that the new store is powered by the extremely KISS-y web framework Ruby on Rails. Rails is the leader in a new style of web development that’s been making waves lately. Having been chiefly a J2EE man prior to this, I found Rails to be quite a refreshing change. I could also (and probably will) fill an entire post with Rails caveats I ran into, but I think it was definitely the right choice for us.
So if you’re one of those people I know who’ve been considering eChef for a while and are teetering on the edge of getting it, now’s a great time to go for it. The store is entirely automated, so you can get instant gratification 24/7. It’s right here whenever you’re ready.
July 31st, 2007 at 6:47 PM
It looks — and works — great!