First time website setting up - jewellery shop, help please! :)

MoneySavingSapphire_:D

I make my own jewellery & sell it on ebay/forums, and would like to set up my own website on which I can display my work and sell it - preferably through the site itself. I'm an absolute total novice to website making full stop, but I also need advice on what hosting service to use as its only a part-time project and so needs to be as cheap as possible!
So far I've come up with:

http://www.streamlinenet.co.uk/sw.php - has an "e-commerce" wizards for £4 a year on top of the £18.99 charge - this seems a very good price but I've never heard of this company before...

or:

http://www.123-reg.co.uk/ - they have the name I want as being avaliable, and their e-shop wizard looks good - the sample site was really nice looking and it looks easy! This would cost £5.18 for the name for 2 years, then £4.99 per month for the shop... actually, this sounds quite good as well, but I'm confused about how much space I'll need... - oh, but it also has a £9.99 set up fee on top, makes it just that bit more expensive I guess...

I want to display photos, with an option to enlarge/see detail, and choose to buy. With maybe, um, 3-4 different sections for different products and then a section on custom pieces, shipping info etc etc

So tell me - is what I want to do feasible, do you have any better suggestions for sites - ones for getting my domain name and ones for hosting my page (enough space for copious photos!) and setting up a shop?

oooh so confused!
Thanks in advance, will be sp grateful for any advice! :A

Astaroth

Firstly never heard of Streamline Net but Streamline is owned by RBS and is a card payment transaction service and it smacks of them trying to get people to associate them with RBS to give themselves credability - but I could be wrong.

Ok... you have 3 options really which will vary in price

1) Use a pre-setup hosted solution - cheap option, minimal customisation can be done, very easy to setup and get going, will look like everyone else that uses the same setup

2) Use an off the shelf package - cheap option, some customisation can be done but requires a fair amount of skill to get it looking wildly different from everyone else that uses the same package, something like oscommerce is very common so buyers will know how to use it, requires more skill to setup

3) Bespoke - most expensive option, can look and operate exactly how you want it to, no skill required from you to setup, may be difficult to modify at a later date if you get bored/ want to refresh the look, if you go too off the wall for how it works people may struggle using it.


The amount of space you need will depend heavily on how many products you are intending to sell and the bandwidth needed as a combination of number of products and how popular.

Pages take up next to no space at all - a tiny amount of space for your "layout" but the vast majority of the space requirements will be based on your product images.

Flexible_Friend

For ecommerce software (especially for jewellery shops) try this free Open Source software. You'll need PHP as part of you hosting package so need a UNIX/Linux host.

http://www.oscommerce.com

Astaroth

there are plenty of other ecommerce software so you can go for a windows host and go for ASP/ ASP.Net or you could go for either and get a .JSP host.... there are lots of options on technologies and everyone has their preferences

MoneySavingSapphire_:D

Astaroth - Looks like the first option - I do want to keep it cheap, and although I don't mind investing a bit of time in setting it up, I'm not very techie-minded at all!

Flexible Friend - what does PHP mean please? And where would I get a UNIX/Linux host cheaply? Told you I wasn't tecnical at all

MoneySavingSapphire_:D

Astaroth wrote:

there are plenty of other ecommerce software so you can go for a windows host and go for ASP/ ASP.Net or you could go for either and get a .JSP host.... there are lots of options on technologies and everyone has their preferences

what do these mean too? :S

>starting to feel a bit out of my depth!<

Mr_Squiddy

MoneySavingSapphire_:D wrote:

http://www.streamlinenet.co.uk/sw.php - has an "e-commerce" wizards for £4 a year on top of the £18.99 charge - this seems a very good price but I've never heard of this company before...

I use Streamline as my web host (admittedly for a non-commercial site) and have had no problems with them at all.

MoneySavingSapphire_:D

Mr_Squiddy wrote:

I use Streamline as my web host (admittedly for a non-commercial site) and have had no problems with them at all.

Ooh really? Cos I've been playing around with their templates trial thing and its looking promising - pretty cheap too, okay, very cheap! Am pretty excited about the prospect of setting up my own site at last :j

Flexible_Friend

Hi MoneySavingSapphire

PHP is just the language the website is written in. These e-commerce software packages are all control panel driven, so you only have to install the initial script and then it's self explanatory. Your web host will do this for you if you ask nicely. You don't need to be a PHP programmer or anything like that.

Everything that JayUK is offering comes as standard/free if your Web Host uses cPanel or Fantasico.


I would recommend this Web Host for price & reliablity.

http://www.dataflame.co.uk/index.html

Astaroth

PHP/ ASP/ ASP.NET/ JSP are all just different languages/ protocols which websites can be written in. HTML is static, everyone sees the same thing and you cannot "interact with it". The other options allow you to create pages on the fly, interact with databases etc.

As others have said, you can download a pre written script (option 2 in my original post) in any of these languages and upload them onto a webhost of your choice. Some require very basic setup (little more than setting a password and username for the admin area) others require more technical setting up before you can start actually setting the preferences for how your site looks and acts.

trythat

I've used http://digitalinet.com for a number of years now, cost $6/month or $60/year, had very few problems with them. Has PHP etc so you can set up whatever software you want, If I remember correctly they have shopping carts they reccomend.

When I was selling my software I used to use a site called http://www.swreg.org/ which is British and allows a number of ways to sell your products, and a number of payment plans, eg. get paid monthly etc, it worked well for me, it was nice to use my code to get the orders etc and then to get SWreg to process the order using their secure servers etc.