The long story. How and why I originally coded a fully working ecommerce solution in 4 days

[websitecareio]

Here is the long story about wcioShop for those who are interested in it. How did I make a full working e-commerce site in 4 days and why did I even do this?

In 2010 I and my mother were starting a business selling tea (Lipton, Pickwick, Heath and Heather, London Fruit and Herb, DJ Miles, etc.) and we had prepared for several months, to find places to buy our products in the UK and getting deals, buying printers and the most important part, setting up the e-commerce site where we wanted to sell our products. After looking into several different e-commerce solutions we decided to use Prestashop with Paypal as our gateway for payments.

Since I did programming this was easy to set up and we didn't really have any rush, we had several months to complete the setup and type in all products, etc.

Around a month before launch, we received the 7.000 flyers we had to deliver to mailboxes. We walked and walked until we didn't want to walk anymore. Took a long time to deliver.

Fast forward 5 days before launch, we were done adding products, gateway, pages, etc. We just needed to do one final check of the site. and this is where I notices something we didn't see before. On every order, there was a 1 øre (0,1479 USD) error.
Having an error like that on all orders was not an option, the tax and refunding 0.01 DKK on every order would be a nightmare.

I quickly got in contact with the developers of the module for Paypal and a lot of different people to find the error and i dug into the code myself to find the error. I had to give up finding the cause of the issues and no one else found it.

Note: I have since figured out that it was a tax issue (rounding on too few decimals). It was an error in Prestashop for several years, at least in 2015 it was still an issue.

5 days before launch and we had that error, what to do? We had to figure out something quickly. We could try a different e-commerce solution. But this being in 2010, the solutions out there weren't that impressive, and what other errors did we encounter? We did select Prestashop for it being a stable working one.

We decide to make a new one ourselves.
I started working on a completely new e-commerce solution. I began setting up the MySQL database and entering some products manually, then setting up the homepage, categories, and then the cart.
The first cart I made was a textarea where it used javascript to save the products, it was terrible, but it worked. We just needed something that worked and if I had more time, I would go back and make it better.

I worked day and night, no sleep at all. I can't remember the specifics about those days, there are simply gone from my memory. I remember when I was done just before the launch when I simply stood up and went to bed, I was tired, angry and really didn't feel well. I had been eating and drinking what I needed. Sleep cannot be underrated.

So what was ready at launch?
Quite a lot, I did have time to go back and fix the cart. What we didn't have was the administration part, which took a couple of weeks to complete. But we got order emails so it wasn't really needed, we changed products using Phpmyadmin when needed.

We ran the site for 3 years and we had to decide what to do. One of us had to go work on it part-time or sell it. We had too many orders and too much work to do.
Since my salary was terrible at that time, I was the only one who could afford to spend more time on the site and build it further, until it earned enough to support both our salaries. But we decided it was time to sell it instead because removing my salary even though it was terrible, was still a bad decision.

We sold it (We specifically looked for someone who knew how to run an e-commerce site and the new owner told us they had experience with it). The new owners managed to completely destroy it within a year and even though we offered to help them run it the first month they didn't at any point in that year contact us.
They then again sold it to someone else who actually contacted us for help making changes to the site and getting it back up and running well again. I gave them an offer to help really cheaply, but they didn't want to spend money on getting help because they had paid a lot for the site (I didn't ask how much) and I wasn't going to help the 2nd owner because the people we sold it to told them to contact me.
It "ran" for a few more years, but the sales were gone.

At the time of the sale, we had 370 different types of tea in stock.