"But then smart arses such as yourself say not to use the likes of Wordpress and Joomla and leave it to professional web developers. So which is it?"
Well the classic route to starting / growing a business is to formulate a business plan and seek funding if the idea is financially feasible. If you've done your research and have a solid plan you will get funding.
If you're simply punting crap from a drop ship outfit you won't.
Cutting corners and bastardising a blog platform to work as a store front isn't a business plan. Sure, it can be done...but are really caring about your customers when you do things on the cheap?
Wordpress, Joomla etc online shops are a cancer...a bit like those dodgy "phone unlocking" tat shit holes that spawn on high streets selling low grade Shenzen specials.
You don't have to get your store front built from scratch but you really should pay the extra dough to deploy a purpose built product rather than try and bend a blog to your will.
Wordpress is badly out of date with its practices. These days there should never be a situation where your front end connects directly to a database. You should have an API in between and your payments should be processed on a box nowhere near your frontend.
Its not expensive to do something like this. Id usually charge in the region of £1000-£2000 for this which for a proper business is peanuts. I can see why this price would look unattractive to someone moonlighting as online vendor attempting to make beer money though.
For a bonafide business (one that is declaring income and trading legitimately), this is barely a cost as it can be written off as an expense against tax.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
