Open source software helps online tea vendor

[Kristijntje]

A couple years ago, I decided to start a Web-based tea business. My hardware decision was already made -- I had an old iMac at home, which was going to become the main business computer. Software was more of a worry. I realized that if I wanted to keep the business on a shoestring, I was going to have to find creative ways of cutting back expenses. For me, the answer was open source software. Many of the open source programs I use are maturing fast, and can now be used as full-featured substitutes for similar proprietary software.

My next need was a shopping cart program. There are several proprietary shopping cart programs available, and I did a thorough search to learn the strengths and weaknesses of each. Eventually, for philosophical reasons as much as for business reasons, I ended up with OSCommerce...

Every retail tea business has a catalog. To produce mine, I needed image processing software and page layout software. For image processing, I turned to the GIMP...

full article: http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl...12/1550224&from=rss