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e3 Commerce System

Posted December 2nd, 2003 in Case Studies (Updated March 19th, 2007)

The e3 Commerce System was created by me, Chris Hope, while working at Webenz. Webenz had been utilising an ecommerce system called Intershop which was marketed in New Zealand by Telecom Xtra as "Business Builder" but found it wasn't suiting the needs of their customers, so they decided to develop their own ecommerce solution.

The initial two revisions were developed using Perl but these were not as flexible as required so two further revisions were created, this time using PHP and MySQL. The end result was an extremely easy to use and flexible system that could easily be customised to suit every customer's needs.

The system allows site administrators to easily manage the following, without the need for constantly referring to a web site developer or programmer:
- products
- customers
- orders
- product categories
- performance reports
- site content

The system uses a series of configuration files to track what information is stored in key database tables; these files allow every website to use a common codebase and administration area which makes upgrades and bug/security fixes easy to apply across the board.

There were once dozens of sites that used the e3 Commerce System, but over time the number has diminished due to businesses closing down or site revamps and overhauls being done by new developers. Webenz has effectively shut down and no longer exists, so no further development work as been done on this ecommerce system and no new sites created using it.