Question by kingsinnersoul: I have a hosting plan and a domain. I want to create an eCommerce site. wanted your ideas…?
I have a hosting plan and a domain. I want to create an eCommerce site. wanted your ideas as to what shopping-cart to use?
payment gateway?
Ideally i want to have a all-in-one program that will manage everything for me. And an easy to change the looks of the pages (like wysiwyg)
Best answer:
Answer by scarmichaeloh
For all in one solutions, you have several choices. Since the shopping cart platform is the basis of your online store, you should take great care in deciding which one you choose. Personally, I have tried Yahoo Stores, ProStores, and 3DCart, for all-in-one solutions. I now use exclusively self-hosted solutions (primarily OSCommerce) although I am experimenting locally with OpenCart and Magento.
I now use professional designers as for me WYSIWYG just did not give me the sharpness and professional looking sites I wanted. When I used WYSIWYG, my sites performed below average and looked too cookie cutter. But to get a very basic site out there it is fine. Just be prepared that if your site ever does warrant a professional web design, it will be built from scratch since ost WYSIWYG code is horriblly constructed.
Here is my experience with all in one solutions:
1. Yahoo Stores – Very good, but expensive. Their Site design tools are hard to use and in some cases just bad. But you can usually find Yahoo store developers who for very cheaply can create great designs. Yahoo uses a proprietary tagging format similar to HTML called RTML. Which means your site cannot be easily moved to another provider without redoing your site. Yahoo’s benefits are the overall features though and you can easily support growth on the platform. (There are literally dozens of sites out of the Top 500 online stores using their platform which says something about their ability to scale)… But again, more expensive and I would only recommend if you plan on getting a Yahoo-capable designer.
2. 3DCart – I used them and really liked them 9up to a point). Their WYSIWYG editor is easy to use and they have some initial templates which will get you started. Their support when I needed it, was very responsive. The downside with them, was that they lacked a lot of advanced features that I wanted. (At the time, they did not support coupon codes, etc)
3. ProStores. I used it for about a month when it first came out and then walked away. It was released before it was ready. Way overpriced in my opinion. I have not checked them out recently though. The last time I looked at them was 3 years ago.
There are literally dozens of others and hopefully others will chime in with their experiences.
One thing to consider, is using a self-hosted option. 98% of the functionality in your store is in your cart system (product catalogue, pages, checkout, etc). It is relatively easy to configure a shopping cart nowadays. (usually its a matter of FTPing a few directories to your server and setting up a database via install scripts).. Instructions are usually included and pretty easy.
The only thing is that the out of the box templates are bad. But… If you can get the functionality working yourself and your site up and running, having a web designer come in to make it look pretty can be done very cheaply. The reason they charge so much is that they do a lot of the basic cart setup that frankly is not that hard to do. The best part about this approach is you can backup your deployed store often, move it to another hosting provider, and later on down the road, do additional integration with 3rd party systems much easier.
We have a lot of resources on our website to give you some tips and advice in setting up an ecommerce store. All is 100% free.
For Payment Gateways/Merchant accounts, etc.. It gets a little harder. The process is not very hard itself, but your choices are harder to make since its hard to get a clear picture of the fees, and the prices from provider to provider change a lot. I currently use 1st National Processing and Authorize.net. Authorize.net is the one I am most comfortable with, but I tend to pay higher fees than I think I should. I would seriously shop around. The prices vary a lot and I got burned a lot and have been placed in contracts with bad providers. Paypal is always an option, both in accepting traditional paypal, but also they have a pro version that can accept credit cards as well. Its very easy to set up, but again, look at the fees. In any case, accepting American Express is always a separate charge than your Visa/MC/Discover regardless of who you choose. Kind of annoying.
The key thing to look at is how much monthly sales you anticipate you will be making (look at profit) and find something that fits within that profit margin where the fees are considered reasonable. Most will try to suck you in a long term contract. Be wary of anything over 12 months. Also, make sure whatever you choose, that you have the ability to run cards over the phone, or over the gateways terminal (in addition to the normal real-time transaction mode on your site)… Many customers like to call you to order. Again, we have some resources that may help you there.
Best of luck!
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