Ecommerce site recommendations?

Digital_Guy

Hi guys,

For those of you who have (or have had) Ecommerce websites, what type of setup did you use, and what are your recommendations / tips?

So WordPress with shopping cart integration (Magento, OpenCart, Woocommerce, Prestashop, etc.) vs vs custom builds, etc.

Then I know there are other platforms like BigCommerce, Bluepark, etc.

The website will need to be pretty flexible and able to accommodate future changes as they arise. As I see it there is a trade off there between the likes of WordPress and custom websites, as well as security considerations in terms of WordPress vs a HTML site.

Anyway, just interested to hear people's personal experiences!

JohnRock

I would recommend to use a standardised product like wordpress with shopping cart integration to keep your costs low at the start.

As the website expands and you're certain you have a viable business then you can migrate to custom solutions which will be costly

Graham

You don't want to go the custom route unless the business model absolutely demands it.

Hard to make any other recommendations unless you provide some information, "it needs to be pretty flexible" does not make a great requirements document.

meijin

Digital_Guy wrote: »

For those of you who have (or have had) Ecommerce websites, what type of setup did you use, and what are your recommendations / tips?

After looking at various options, I've decided to use BigCommerce, as my products are quite complex (many variants), and I'm very happy with the choice.

Custom/self-hosted would be more flexible, but would require more money or time to setup.

Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions or need help.

testicles

This post has been deleted.

mrawkward

Used Bluepark for years, easy integration with ERP, multiple volume pricing options per product, multi currency, 1000s of line items, great support...really great support and stunning value. If you can fit on their templates, I doubt you will find better value/uptime/reliability/ease of use. I would use them again in the morning

Axwell

You havent given enough information to get a proper recommendation.

How many categories and products are you selling?

Do you sell a lot of products outside of Ireland?

What payment platforms do you want to integrate into the website?

Do you have single products or products with multiple variations - different sizes, colours etc?

As Graham said custom is not the option unless you a very good reason to - there are plenty of options available, some of which you mentioned - you left out Shopify which is another good solution.

It all depends on your requirements so you will need to provide more information for a recommendation that suits your specific needs than just general recommendations on ecommerce solutions.

davindub

Unless you have someone to look after the website, don't attempt to host your own solution. Before I became an accountant, I part-time developed sites using PHP on lamp stacks.

Wordpress looks quick and easy to get your website up, just install on the server and install a theme. But beyond that you need to optimize and cache pages, most themes will not be optimized for page speed, test on different devices, test concurrent users limits, security reviews, server maintenance, etc. Even just dealing with your images is a long process, new 2x, 3x screens require high spec images and you need to deliver these as well as smallers ones to mobile devices.

HTML sites can be more secure, but you cannot process orders on your own server.

Solutions like shopify allow you to concentrate on getting your business up and running while they look after the hosting side, trade offs are the lack of customization. You can use both Paypal and Stripe as well. Also I know from an accounting view, Shopify is ok, it gives you a breakdown of payment methods so you can reconcile to Paypal/Stripe/your bank account. Get your accounting systems in order from the start. Integrate Shopify with an accounts package like Xero, reconcile every month, you will probably have a lot of refunds to keep an eye on, balances on Stripe readjusting etc.

Digital_Guy

davindub wrote: »

Unless you have someone to look after the website, don't attempt to host your own solution. Before I became an accountant, I part-time developed sites using PHP on lamp stacks.

Wordpress looks quick and easy to get your website up, just install on the server and install a theme. But beyond that you need to optimize and cache pages, most themes will not be optimized for page speed, test on different devices, test concurrent users limits, security reviews, server maintenance, etc. Even just dealing with your images is a long process, new 2x, 3x screens require high spec images and you need to deliver these as well as smallers ones to mobile devices.

HTML sites can be more secure, but you cannot process orders on your own server.

Solutions like shopify allow you to concentrate on getting your business up and running while they look after the hosting side, trade offs are the lack of customization. You can use both Paypal and Stripe as well. Also I know from an accounting view, Shopify is ok, it gives you a breakdown of payment methods so you can reconcile to Paypal/Stripe/your bank account. Get your accounting systems in order from the start. Integrate Shopify with an accounts package like Xero, reconcile every month, you will probably have a lot of refunds to keep an eye on, balances on Stripe readjusting etc.

Thanks guys. The product range will probably be around 60-70 products as an estimate, maybe 5-6 categories, a homepage and all the usual other pages.

The main requirements are for the site to be as fast as possible, on a platform as optimised as possible. I could set up a WordPress site and figure out how to add WooCommerce, and so I suppose my main question is around theme recommendations and the overall approach there? Davindub sums it up there around what you need to be looking for.

Some sites I see have huge images and rate around 40-50% or worse on a speed test - I would want ours to be up around the 80%+ mark, via a theme that is really well coded and optimised.

Graham

WordPress/WooCommerce is a good entry level self-hosted solution. It's not rocket science to install a theme, a cache plugin and a payment processor but you will need some technical knowledge. It's not going to cope with Amazon levels of traffic but it's quick, cheap and makes for a good DIY solution.

Magento would be the next step-up self-hosted option. It scales well, is very configurable but does require a step-up in knowledge for both the infrastructure and the site configuration. Price is free (unless you opt for the enterprise version) but hosting will costs slightly more than your average WordPress site.

Cloud solutions (Shopify et al.) are really ease to setup. Infrastructure isn't your problem and no technical knowledge is required. They're not as flexible as self-hosted solutions so are probably not the way to go if you're requirements are out of the ordinary. The ongoing monthly pricing is something you need to check out with the provider. A good non-technical option particularly for beginners.

_Brian

I use opencart.
It's easy to use, no coding required unless your feeling adventurous.

Lots of video instructions online and a good support forum.

Digital_Guy

Graham wrote: »

WordPress/WooCommerce is a good entry level self-hosted solution. It's not rocket science to install a theme, a cache plugin and a payment processor but you will need some technical knowledge. It's not going to cope with Amazon levels of traffic but it's quick, cheap and makes for a good DIY solution.

Magento would be the next step-up self-hosted option. It scales well, is very configurable but does require a step-up in knowledge for both the infrastructure and the site configuration. Price is free (unless you opt for the enterprise version) but hosting will costs slightly more than your average WordPress site.

Cloud solutions (Shopify et al.) are really ease to setup. Infrastructure isn't your problem and no technical knowledge is required. They're not as flexible as self-hosted solutions so are probably not the way to go if you're requirements are out of the ordinary. The ongoing monthly pricing is something you need to check out with the provider. A good non-technical option particularly for beginners.

Graham what in your view are the advantages of Magento over WP + WooCommerce? If it is mainly just the flexibility re product listings and so on then that's not a big draw, but if there are other factors I'd be interested to hear your take.

I've thought about Shopify a bit too, but I am always wary of 'hosted for you' solutions. Even if they say they are really SEO-friendly, they still control the architecture behind your site, and I would have serious doubts that a Shopify site can compete with a site built on WP in terms of SEO traffic.

It does look very attractive in terms of ease of set up though - ready to go themes, etc, but I imagine that the WP + Woo option would not take much more effort to set up.

Digital_Guy

_Brian wrote: »

I use opencart.
It's easy to use, no coding required unless your feeling adventurous.

Lots of video instructions online and a good support forum.

I hear good things, OpenCart does look really good and I have come across sites running on it before (or at least one that I recall). Did you compare it to other options like WooCommerce before choosing it? Do you sell many products can I ask?

Graham

Digital_Guy wrote: »

Graham what in your view are the advantages of Magento over WP + WooCommerce? If it is mainly just the flexibility re product listings and so on then that's not a big draw, but if there are other factors I'd be interested to hear your take.

I'm currently building a website for the Mrs. Had initially planned on using WP/Woo but it just didn't offer the flexibility we needed around configurable products. E.g. Product A in material B, size C, colour D type E.

We're using a hosting provider that specialises in Magento so even the basic shared hosting package has the dev site loading quickly.

Axwell

Digital_Guy wrote: »

Graham what in your view are the advantages of Magento over WP + WooCommerce? If it is mainly just the flexibility re product listings and so on then that's not a big draw, but if there are other factors I'd be interested to hear your take.

WP+Woo Commerce allows you to add an ecommerce solution to an existing website - its an add on really imo. In terms of how it looks and the layout etc its determinded a lot by the wordpress theme. WooCommerce gives you a good amount of options in terms of functionality/shipping etc. Its a good starting point and for the number of products you are talking its fine.

Magento is a fully functioning ecommerce solution - as oppose to an add on. It is a shop with content added on, you can have your pages for 'About Us' etc but the real bulk of the content is the shop. It has a huge amount of functionality for everything. In terms of scalability and performance Magento is a better solution and will cater for a lot more products but it comes with added hosting costs and is a bit more complex to get up and running although you can get themes for it the same as you can for wordpress.

jenn1984

I use Nitrosell - fully functioning like Magento. Hosted on their server. A bit fiddly at times but pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. Good support forum and live chat customer service. We use Realex and Paypal as payment solutions. Integrates with your Point Of Sale so it's complimentary to it and not stand alone.

Digital_Guy

Axwell wrote: »

WP+Woo Commerce allows you to add an ecommerce solution to an existing website - its an add on really imo. In terms of how it looks and the layout etc its determinded a lot by the wordpress theme. WooCommerce gives you a good amount of options in terms of functionality/shipping etc. Its a good starting point and for the number of products you are talking its fine.

Magento is a fully functioning ecommerce solution - as oppose to an add on. It is a shop with content added on, you can have your pages for 'About Us' etc but the real bulk of the content is the shop. It has a huge amount of functionality for everything. In terms of scalability and performance Magento is a better solution and will cater for a lot more products but it comes with added hosting costs and is a bit more complex to get up and running although you can get themes for it the same as you can for wordpress.

Yep I've been inside the Magento UI and it's a huge interface with tonnes of flexibility for sure. I think that WP + Woo is probably perfect for our needs at this time anyway. It has also has the advantage of watertight integration with WP too, which is great.

davindub

Sure get started with WP and Woo, maybe get a WP specific host to look after the hosting, and maybe act as consultants for advice when needed, try www.etailor.ie, i've used them before, they were pretty decent.

When starting if you want to keep development time down, use a theme, it won't be optimised (i've never come across a optimised theme), but run images through something like tinypng. You need a lot of images now for each screen size to keep pagespeed happy, there is a new way of getting the browser to load the most suitable image which helps a bit but I doubt any of the WP themes will have it. But do what you can.

WP-super cache will do for the moment. To give you a contrast in server tuning, a ten euro a month virtual machine could handle 4 concurrent users with wp. Delivering only server cached html pages using nginx, I got it up to 250 concurrent users. But the hard thing for the moment is to get users onto your site and making sure your margins are acceptable at a competitive price, etc.

Best of luck!

EIREHotspur

Graham wrote: »

I'm currently building a website for the Mrs. Had initially planned on using WP/Woo but it just didn't offer the flexibility we needed around configurable products. E.g. Product A in material B, size C, colour D type E.

We're using a hosting provider that specialises in Magento so even the basic shared hosting package has the dev site loading quickly.

Woocommerce handles products like that....I built a Doors websites with configurable products...I take it you didn't want to buy a plugin to get you there though?

WooCommerce is the best solution because it means you can stick with Wordpress which is the most adaptable Designwise and can get you to where you need to go for the least money...

Digital_Guy

EIREHotspur wrote: »

Woocommerce handles products like that....I built a Doors websites with configurable products...I take it you didn't want to buy a plugin to get you there though?

WooCommerce is the best solution because it means you can stick with Wordpress which is the most adaptable Designwise and can get you to where you need to go for the least money...

Yep agreed, WooCommerce is looking so easy to set up and use. You can't go wrong with WP really for a 'standard' set-up at least, it's amazing to think you can have a website / fully functioning Ecommerce business up and running within hours!

Graham

EIREHotspur wrote: »

Woocommerce handles products like that....I built a Doors websites with configurable products...I take it you didn't want to buy a plugin to get you there though?

Woo, even with plugins would have been a stretch to support the type of configurable products we were looking to offer. I've no doubt we could have customised an existing plugin to do the job fully if we'd decided to go down that route.

What clinched Magento in the end was its ability to automatically create the product catalogue based on the pre-defined options we were looking at. That was a massive win for us, reducing the time to create the 14000+ simple product variants into a matter of days rather than weeks. That and I made a judgment call that although technically(theoretically) Woo could support that number of products, it's not really what it was designed for and would have left little scope for expansion.

I am a massive fan of Woo, I've recommended (and used it) many times to people that want a quick, theme-able self-hosted e-commerce operation but in this instance Magento was a better fit to the requirements.

A lot of people opt for Woo because they know WordPress rather than because Woo is the best solution. A perfectly valid choice given the best technical solution is often not the best solution from a business perspective.

EIREHotspur wrote: »

WooCommerce is the best solution because it means you can stick with Wordpress which is the most adaptable Designwise and can get you to where you need to go for the least money...

Not sure I'd agree with that statement. WP imposes certain design restrictions much as any other solution would. WP/Woo does have the benefit of an abundance of quick/cheap themes, as (to a lesser extent) do Magento, Shopify, OpenCommerce.

Trojan

My general rules of thumb for ecommerce for small businesses (particularly in first couple years of business):

0. Buy your domain yourself so you own it outside of whatever your intended hosting solution is and don't have hassle re-pointing it.

1. Start with 3-6 months on a hosted solution like Shopify to see if you can do ecommerce: drive traffic and make sales. Learn while paying less than $50 a month.

2. Then switch to a [more expensive, custom built] self-hosted install when you start feeling constrained by their system:
a. Magento if you've got over a hundred products, or very complex products.
b. Less than that, a WordPress & WooCommerce install will suffice and should be more flexible.

Like I said, a very general rule of thumb and not perfect for everyone.

Digital_Guy

Trojan wrote: »

My general rules of thumb for ecommerce for small businesses (particularly in first couple years of business):

0. Buy your domain yourself so you own it outside of whatever your intended hosting solution is and don't have hassle re-pointing it.

1. Start with 3-6 months on a hosted solution like Shopify to see if you can do ecommerce: drive traffic and make sales. Learn while paying less than $50 a month.

2. Then switch to a [more expensive, custom built] self-hosted install when you start feeling constrained by their system:
a. Magento if you've got over a hundred products, or very complex products.
b. Less than that, a WordPress & WooCommerce install will suffice and should be more flexible.

Like I said, a very general rule of thumb and not perfect for everyone.

Agreed, especially if you aren't tech savvy and just want to get up and running with minimal oversight on the tech side of things.

Graham

Digital_Guy wrote: »

Agreed, especially if you aren't tech savvy and just want to get up and running with minimal oversight on the tech side of things.

Even if you are tech savvy, it's a good approach. Quick, limited up-front investment that allows you to test the market quickly and refine your requirements in a real-world scenario.

Digital_Guy

Graham wrote: »

Even if you are tech savvy, it's a good approach. Quick, limited up-front investment that allows you to test the market quickly and refine your requirements in a real-world scenario.

Don't quite agree Graham, but that's only because of my online marketing hat is always on As I said earlier, hosted solutions a la Shopify, Squarespace, Wix (shudder), aren't ideal from an SEO / digital marketing perspective, so if you are tech savvy self-hosting is the way to go, where you way more control over site architecture and can start to build content and domain authority on a really optimised platform like WP.

Of course, it totally depends on other factors too - maybe you are going to be really busy getting the business set up, working with suppliers, managing stock etc, and you want to spend as little time as possible on the website side of things.

The above is with the caveat of having not actually gotten into using WooCommerce just yet!

Graham

Digital_Guy wrote: »

Don't quite agree Graham, but that's only because of my online marketing hat is always on As I said earlier, hosted solutions a la Shopify, Squarespace, Wix (shudder), aren't ideal from an SEO / digital marketing perspective

Squarespace/Wix aren't what I'd consider e-commerce solutions. Shopify (and most other hosted solutions) offer pretty much the same scope for SEO that any self-hosted solution does.

I can't think of any SEO optimisation opportunities that are missing from Shopify. Custom URLs, rich snippets, meta data, sitemaps, robots.txt support. It's all there.

Of all the reasons not to consider most hosted solutions, I don't think SEO is one of them.

Digital_Guy

Graham wrote: »

Squarespace/Wix aren't what I'd consider e-commerce solutions. Shopify (and most other hosted solutions) offer pretty much the same scope for SEO that any self-hosted solution does.

I can't think of any SEO optimisation opportunities that are missing from Shopify. Custom URLs, rich snippets, meta data, sitemaps, robots.txt support. It's all there.

Of all the reasons not to consider most hosted solutions, I don't think SEO is one of them.

Agree they're not Ecommerce solutions, never said that Just that they are hosted for you. Shopify does seems quite well-optimised for SEO now, but up until a few years ago they didn't let you edit robots.txt. Either way you aren't hosting the site, and that's what I would recommend against. Ultimately you don't have control, no matter how optimised the platform. Shopify could change anything at any time and you've no say in how it may affect your site.

At the same time, in the context of someone starting off, it is a great solution. Especially if you do plan to start with it and then move to hosting yourself.

Graham

Digital_Guy wrote: »

Shopify could change anything at any time and you've no say in how it may affect your site.

I'm not sure that's a limitation from a Digital Marketing SEO perspective. Either way, the same could be said of self-hosted off-the-shelf products unless you're planning to ignore vendor updates.

For (most) e-commerce startups, the right solution is the one that gets them up and running the fastest, for the lowest upfront cost and the lowest technical/infrastructure requirements.

Digital_Guy

Graham wrote: »

I'm not sure that's a limitation from a Digital Marketing SEO perspective. Either way, the same could be said of self-hosted off-the-shelf products unless you're planning to ignore vendor updates.

For (most) e-commerce startups, the right solution is the one that gets them up and running the fastest, for the lowest upfront cost and the lowest technical/infrastructure requirements.

Yeah after doing some more research it really looks like there is little difference. And after my site going offline for some unknown reason after tinkering around with a child theme, Shopify is looking extremely attractive indeed! Even the fact that they provide an SSL certificate as part of the package is brilliant.

With WP the costs and time / oversight involved really do seem to add up too - themes, SSL, plugins, security, managing plugins, integrating new features, etc.

tacofries

I was offered a grant by LEO in order develop a website. In reality the website will be very simple consisting of a home page, product page and an about us page. On the home page there will be pictures of 3 separate products which the user can click on to direct them to a specific page about that product where they can then click a buy now button.

Originally the aim was to use the grant to make a demo video for the website as well as take a few product photos, but I have since being told that the grant is purely for website development costs and not its actual design/promo materials.

Do you think that I should decline the grant for developing a website and just use Shopify instead?

Sorry for hijacking the thread,.

StupidLikeAFox

tacofries wrote: »

Originally the aim was to use the grant to make a demo video for the website as well as take a few product photos, but I have since being told that the grant is purely for website development costs and not its actual design/promo materials.

Do you think that I should decline the grant for developing a website and just use Shopify instead?

Sorry for hijacking the thread,.

Even if you did go with Shopify it sounds like the photos and video are a part of setting up the website - you could argue that it is a legitimate cost of website development?