Shop Store

pablo21

Folks, looking for some recomendations for an online shopping channel that I can purchase and setup on my own hosting. I know there are lots of free ones I can use but would you recomend going for somethin a bit better? Dont mind spending a few bob on something good! Anyone any experience in setting this up? Also what would you recomend for handling payments?
All help greatly appreciated!

Chardee MacDennis

shopping software? like zencart or oscommerce? they're perfect solutions even if they're free

pablo21

I've no doubt they are very good but I want to challenge some major players so I'm going to need something very tasty. I haven't much experience with them so whats the benefit's of some of the off the shelf systems?

Chardee MacDennis

well thats what some of the major players use like Play.com, and if its good enough for them i can guess its good enough for you!

forbairt

Magento is nice ... if a bit of a beast at times

and re play ... its running oscommerce / zen ????

p

The real way to get something nice is to hire a web design company to build something for you or else, take something public and modify it for a more streamlined approach.

Either way, having a proper web team at the centre of the process is the best way to get good results.

littlegreenman

If you want to impress, Magento is your only man. Your hoster should be able to set it up for you.

Oscommerce is too dated, and lacks the big bang appeal you're looking for.

roundcrisis

Depends what you are trying to do, and how, try to keep the feature lsit short and concentrate in getting those features working really well.
That way you can grow on success, better having a shop that works well and its quick than one that can do a lot of things badly or that fails, then you can add things incrementally.
oscommerce is a royal Pain to maintain, really really horrible code, fair enough it does what it says on the tin , however if I was you I d stay well away from it ( and I have hehehe)
Best of luck!

littlegreenman

Roundcrisis has picked up on a good point - speed.
At moment Magento wouldn't be the fasted kid on the block (it was terrible about 3 months ago), however from their forums, it will be getting faster. In addition there are tweaks that you can do to Magento to speed things up a bit.

Scotty #

If it's purely a shopping site then I'd go with Magento. If you intend having articles, news, a blog, etc, then I'd go with Joomla and Virtuemart.

As someone mentioned above though, Magento takes some learning. It's not as easy to use as some of the others mentioned but you will have a better system at the end of the day.

osCommerce sucks these days. They've fallen well behind and Zen and CRELoaded are just spin offs of OSC.

If you really plan on taking on the big players then you probably will end up paying for a system in the long run. All 'free' systems have their shortfall in one way or another.

pablo21

Thanks for all that guys! WHats involved or how complex or expensive is it to get setup with accepting credit cards etc?

Scotty #

pablo21 wrote: »

WHats involved or how complex or expensive is it to get setup with accepting credit cards etc?

You need an 'online merchant account' from your bank to accept credit cards online. If you already have a bricks and mortar shop that has a visa machine then your probably ok. If you don't they can be a bloody nightmare to get. We got one with Bank of Ireland a couple of years ago but it took almost a year and several refusals before we got it. They just don't want to touch them and I'd imagine it's a lot harder now with the credit crunch.

You can use the likes of worldpay or paypal but they will charge a higher % and monthly subscription. Also make sure to get loads of info about chargeback fees etc.

If you do use paypal or any of these make sure you have a good shipping system. The smallest complaint and paypal will issue a refund to the buyer. Make sure you get proof of delivery for everything.

Cróga

Has anyone used WP eCommerce for Wordpress?