I started this blog to document the process of taming the beast that is Business Catalyst. Having selected finally selected BC for our online shop, we threw ourselves at it with plenty of enthusiasm, glad to be finally getting on with the process of getting an online store.

Very shortly into the process of getting our store set up, we started to peel back the glossy veneer of BC marketing, to reveal a maddeningly strange beast under the hood. This blog is mostly therapy for me - but in allowing me to document some of the triple-reverse-pike hacks I’ve resorted to in order to get a site I’m happy with, I’ll hopefully provide some useful tips and trips for other BC victims. I mean customers.

What this blog is not

I’m not going to provide an exhaustive tutorial on setting up a BC store. You can find those elsewhere. Actually you can’t - what you will find is a hodge-podge of aging documentation, forums, knowledge bases and video tutorials spread across several websites.

How did we get here?

I dont’ really plan to document our process of arriving at BC for our online shop, apart from this brief decription:

At $39 a month, Business Catalyst is seems like attractive proposition for a small business looking for a one-stop-shop hosted ecommerce platform.

We had looked at many alternatives, and settled on Business Catalyst for a number of advertised reasons:

1. a decent product / shop schema. Too many other shopping cart / eCommerce platforms seemed to be limited in strange ways. Like, the number of categories a product could belong to, or not supporting product variations, or limiting the number of products per category, or not allowing subcategories…
2. being hosted, we don’t have to worry about staying up to date, or applying security fixes etc. In many “open-source” cart systems, keeping up-to-date with the latest security fixes seems to involve constant vigilance of user forums where various patches and individual file updates are posted on epic “read this now!” threads. Often these combined adhoc patches and updates can supercede released versions of the software by years. Someone should introduce these people to configuration management.
3. direct payment integration with an Australian Bank (no gouging “gateway” middlemen)
4. “complete” control of HTML and CSS of the site. In quotes, because inevitably this turned out to be far from the case.
5. no lock-in. Well, not much lock-in. We’re obviously investing in the platform, so there will definitely be a cost in moving in the future, but we haven’t signed any lengthy contracts either.
6. various other reasons I forgot.

So where is your site?

When the site gets a bit further along, I will reveal it, but its still in its very early stages now.