E-commerce advice.

jamesbil

Can some one recommend a good eCommerce hosting site? Is shopify any good? or wix? Or others, Irish company would be good if affordable.

Or would a designer be better?
Shop will have 40+ products, 5 or 6 categories, links, filter search, etc.
No logo, just nice simple header, whole site will be easy to look at, simple to the point.
Able to take paypal and card payment, also will need to be able to add and edit items myself.

All constructive advice welcome, who to use, how to set up, ball park of costs, what percentage mark-up, anything really.

Thanks
James

off.the.walls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65gV8JOgWkQ these tutorials might help with it.

maxmarmalade

I use Open Cart and am quite happy with it. It's free and fairly painless to set up

MOH

ZenCart and Magento would be two other well used cart packages.
ZenCart's supposed to be easier to work with, although coming to it from Magento I found the interface far less intuitive.

Learning curve for developing with Magento is a lot steeper, and the biggest problem is it's a bit of a resource hog compared to most of it's competitors. For a small shop though it is possible to run it at reasonable speeds, even on shared hosting.

My only worry with built-in hosting like Shopify and Wix is that you're tied to them, if you have any hosting problems you can't really move.
If you're using any of the standalone cart packages like ZenCart, OpenCart, etc it's much easier to move to a new host.
That said, it obviously works for a lot of people.

I'd suggest getting yourself some hosting somewhere, on a monthly basis if you can, installing some of the carts mentioned, and just play around with them a bit to see how you like the interface on the admin side. Might help narrow it down a bit. There's a few more listed here.

As regards the front end, there's loads of free and paid themes avaiable. Once you've narrowed it down a bit, just google '<shopping cart name> theme', or ThemeForest might be a good place to start.

On the payment side, if you want to take credit and laser cards directly you're going to need a merchant account with your bank, and set up with someone like RealEx. The fees are hefty enough until you build up a decent volume of sales, I'd definitely recommend just using Paypal initially. Unless you think it's going to put your customers off.

Finally, any reason you don't want a logo? Going to look a bit weird without one. Even just a simple text-based logo would be better than nothing.

jamesbil

Been looking at sites and getting confused!

So opencart is a shop designer? then you need to buy a domain and hosting?
Similar with shopify as far as I can work out.

What about register365? this seems to be shop design and hosting, as does hosting Ireland. tho the fees differ quite a bit.

Has anyone used these?

Thanks

jamesbil

Ah thats a bit clearer now, thanks,

Correct me if I'm wrong;

1; build shop with zen or open cart
2; buy domain and hosting
3; upload to there

I do already have some hosting that a friend looks after for me, so I could start with that.
As for the lack of a logo, that was only an initial thought, to use a simple name as a banner in a nice font, but I have nothing against logos either:)

Are zen and opencart free? I have in the past looked at ones that were free to build then a fee to use.

Thanks again...

MOH

You need hosting, you need the cart software, and you need the 'theme', which is basically just re-skinning the cart front end to look how you want it.

Some places, e.g. Shopify, Wix, Magento Go, Blacknight's GIBO, sell you the hosting, and have their own built-in shopping carts, with a variety of themes to choose from, and varying levels of customising the design further.

Alternatively, you can choose your own hosting, find a free open source shopping cart like the ones mention above, and upload it yourself (or some hosts offer a straighforward one-click install), and either find a free or paid theme online, or pay a designer to do it for you.

The built-in option is possibly more straightforward to get set up.
On the downside, you mightn't have quite as much flexibility to customise things, and you're not going to be able to change host easily.
But that mightn't be an issue for you.

It all comes down to personal preference. If you're not that technical, and you're in a hurry to get set up, maybe you'd be better off going with one of the 'built-in' options. Blacknight have a 'Getting business online' initiative which I think gives you everything free for a year. Shopify seems to be free for a month.

If you have the time, don't mind getting a little technical, and are willing to learn a bit, try getting hosting and doing it yourself. If that doesn't work out, fall back to one of the 'built-in' options.

Either way, best of luck!

jamesbil

great advice thanks..
one more q, what are thoughts on hyphenated domain names? eg; www.my-name.com

KonFusion

jamesbil wrote: »

great advice thanks..
one more q, what are thoughts on hyphenated domain names? eg; www.my-name.com

As far as SEO goes, I don't think it makes a difference.

Personally I'm against hyphenated domain names though, as when you tell someone your domain is "my name hyphen dot com" they will most likely forget the hyphen.

If you need to discriminate an important keyword (penisland.com / pen-island.com = see the difference?) then by all means use a hyphen, or buy both hyphenated and un-hyphenated domain names if possible and 301 redirect one to the other.

jamesbil

I had 2 reasons to hyphenate, 1, to make it a double barrelled name, with 2 words so it isnt just a jumble of letters,
and 2, because the name without a hyphen is taken by one of those domain resellers, I can get the name with a hyphen for €10 but without hyphen from a reseller for the bargain price of $50,000!

MOH

jamesbil wrote: »

I had 2 reasons to hyphenate, 1, to make it a double barrelled name, with 2 words so it isnt just a jumble of letters,
and 2, because the name without a hyphen is taken by one of those domain resellers, I can get the name with a hyphen for €10 but without hyphen from a reseller for the bargain price of $50,000!

Your only problem with that is that people will forget about the hyphen and end up at the other site.

jamesbil

yeah, thats what i'm thinking too... only solution, change name?