E-commerce platform sellers. Who regulates them?

quizzling

I have been ripped off 3 times now by 3 different e-commerce platform sellers.
Can anyone help?

They say (free support) but then they keep you in a queue for ages on an 0871 or 0845 number which ends up costing more than they charge you monthly. There's Search engine optimization, email accounts, product amounts, templates, web space to consider. Anyone can start a company up & say they are the best but who is it that regulates them all? As far as my research show the answer is Nobody! Business link is closing down & said they had no idea & citizens advice couldn't help, Trading standards couldn't help either!

Setting up has been a nightmare. 2 weeks I was told. It's now been 7 weeks & I am still having to wait 48hrs for them to reply to my emails! There are hundreds of companies doing this & they are getting away with it hand over fist.

Is anyone policing this part of the market or any way of finding out who is good & who is bad. Is there an overseer of this selling practice> I'm not even sure what it's called. I'm not talking about hosting. I am talking about companies that rent you a website with a template & you pay them monthly. I'm told it's ecommerce selling platforms but I'm not sure.


At the moment it's pot luck & I have been very unlucky to the sum of approx £500 in the last two years.

Starting a business with an online ecommerce platform should be transparent but the pitfalls are many.

Does anyone know of any research done on who is to be trusted in this field?

At the moment it is Russian roulette. I am now looking at trying freestart but they want payment for a whole year upfront. Anyone familiar with them?

Regards,

Jon

pitkin2020

quizzling wrote: »

I have been ripped off 3 times now by 3 different e-commerce platform sellers.
Can anyone help?

They say (free support) but then they keep you in a queue for ages on an 0871 or 0845 number which ends up costing more than they charge you monthly. There's Search engine optimization, email accounts, product amounts, templates, web space to consider. Anyone can start a company up & say they are the best but who is it that regulates them all? As far as my research show the answer is Nobody! Business link is closing down & said they had no idea & citizens advice couldn't help, Trading standards couldn't help either!

Setting up has been a nightmare. 2 weeks I was told. It's now been 7 weeks & I am still having to wait 48hrs for them to reply to my emails! There are hundreds of companies doing this & they are getting away with it hand over fist.

Is anyone policing this part of the market or any way of finding out who is good & who is bad. Is there an overseer of this selling practice> I'm not even sure what it's called. I'm not talking about hosting. I am talking about companies that rent you a website with a template & you pay them monthly. I'm told it's ecommerce selling platforms but I'm not sure.


At the moment it's pot luck & I have been very unlucky to the sum of approx £500 in the last two years.

Starting a business with an online ecommerce platform should be transparent but the pitfalls are many.

Does anyone know of any research done on who is to be trusted in this field?

At the moment it is Russian roulette. I am now looking at trying freestart but they want payment for a whole year upfront. Anyone familiar with them?

Regards,

Jon

Your issue maybe your budget, sorry but for a fully functional ecommerce site £500 won't even scrape the surface and you mentioned 3 companies, less than £200 each time. I maybe wrong but it appears if your budget is far lower than your expectations.

As for recommendations, what is it you want exactly?? i.e in terms of set up

InsideInsurance

If it is false advertising then it would be the Advertising Standards Agency but that assumes the "company" is actually in the UK.

Web hosting/ development is not explicitly regulated and so it is just the general agencies like the ASA or TS that you can turn to but remember that in most cases these will be seen as a Business to Business relationship and therefore the amount of nanny state protection is much lower than if it were a B2C.

Is there a particular reason for going for this model?

chalkie99

Note to other posters -

This same question has been asked in at least 5 sections of the forum today, the OP seems a little over excited about it.

Maybe a mod could merge everything into the most relevant section to keep all the replies together?

AliceJenkins

Your right, it is full of con-artists and trust no one.

I can't the statics off hand, but something like 99% of eCommerce stores close within 6 months, and most of them never get a single order.

eCommerce is not easy, it's thousands of times harder than traditional retail.

BusinessWoman

Have you tried volusion, shoplift or magneto? There is a paid version of magneto and a free one also but you do have to pay for add ons.

HTH

InsideInsurance

AliceJenkins wrote: »

eCommerce is not easy, it's thousands of times harder than traditional retail.

Its not harder at all, and that is almost the problem.

To set up a traditional retail store you would need:

£X0,000 to get the property

£Y0,000 for shopfitters and signmakers etc

£Z00 on till, card machines and other POS paraphernalia

£A0,000 on stock

I think one article a while back said that on a lease hold property you'd be looking £50,000 -> £100,000 of initial investment to get a small shop up and running

The problem online is you get people not wanting to invest £100,000 but wanting to do it for under £100!

Where the web does cut down massively on the overheads of setting up it creates a different problem of being found. Even the most simple person would realise you don't put a wedding shop in the middle of a factory complex. That if you pay more for a high street shop you're going to get more visitors.

With the web everyone is in a back street in the middle of no where with no passing footfall initially. That £99,900 that has been saved from the setup costs of a physical shop has to be partially spent on driving visitors to your store.

The internet is a low cost option, it is not a no cost option unless you have a lot of time, skills and contacts.

AliceJenkins

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Its not harder at all, and that is almost the problem.

To set up a traditional retail store you would need:

£X0,000 to get the property

£Y0,000 for shopfitters and signmakers etc

£Z00 on till, card machines and other POS paraphernalia

£A0,000 on stock

I think one article a while back said that on a lease hold property you'd be looking £50,000 -> £100,000 of initial investment to get a small shop up and running

The problem online is you get people not wanting to invest £100,000 but wanting to do it for under £100!

Where the web does cut down massively on the overheads of setting up it creates a different problem of being found. Even the most simple person would realise you don't put a wedding shop in the middle of a factory complex. That if you pay more for a high street shop you're going to get more visitors.

With the web everyone is in a back street in the middle of no where with no passing footfall initially. That £99,900 that has been saved from the setup costs of a physical shop has to be partially spent on driving visitors to your store.

The internet is a low cost option, it is not a no cost option unless you have a lot of time, skills and contacts.

Spending money is in no way difficult, thats the problem most people on here have.

eCommerce is much harder and that's why the failure rate for eCommerce is massively higher than bricks and mortar.

You have no customers, no orders, nothing.

Where on earth did you dream those costs up? my family has 3 shops in it and I can assure you the average cost of a shop is no where near 100k. In fact the last shop in my family was set up for 20k thats everything in, in a city center location.

Did you just completely make that up? or where you looking at prices on Oxford street and next door to Harrods?

Go look at commercial property on right move.

InsideInsurance

The failure rate is higher because people dont plan because of the low cost of entry..... back in my web development days I had hundreds of people that approached wanting an ecommerce site set up but they had no products identified, no branding, no supply chain, no keywords, no target market, no USPs.... they simply heard the internet was an easy way to make money so wanted their ecommerce site. Looking both on here but more so on the likes of Digital Spy you still get daily posts of people doing the same.

You are fortunate to be able to set up a shop for £20,000. The majority are not so fortunate; local to us your looking at circa £60k pa lease of a small unit on the high street so with 2 months deposit plus one months rent your talking £18,000 just to get the keys.

Obviously when people are going to be spending even your £20,000 on setting up a store and then £X,000 a month on rent, water, electric, rates etc they are much more likely to do some planning before hand. I've not heard of many people renting a shop and getting the shop fitting done and only then considering what they are going to actually sell, where they'll buy it from etc. Failing to plan is planning to fail.

If you take the average running cost of a physical store, deduct off the running cost of an ecommerce store and spent the net difference on a combination of long tail and short tail keywords and have a functional site with acceptable pricing I cannot believe the ecommerce store would have no customers, no orders, nothing.

Absolutely agree that if you spend £50 on webhosting, use oscommerce with a free theme and simply submit the site to the search engines for indexing that you will have nothing but that is because at least some of what you save on running cost must be reinvested in advertising because there is no natural footfall unless you happen to be very good at SEO and/ or your in a niche where all of your competitors are even worse at SEO than you.

terra_ferma

BusinessWoman wrote: »

Have you tried volusion, shoplift or magneto? There is a paid version of magneto and a free one also but you do have to pay for add ons.

HTH

I'm not sure shoplifting is going to help them..
and perhaps magneto won't be of much help either (who according to wikipedia "is a fictional character that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics."
:whistle:

I know you mean Magento, but I can't work out who shoplift is supposed to be... :question:

Edit: I think I got it: shopify?

patman99

I got lumbered wit the task of registering a domain and setting-up an ecommerce site for a local business who's owner is a friend of a friend. The remit was "as cheap as you can. I have no real budget'.
The result -
One DN + years shared hosting on one of the unlimited-webspace sites, cost £50
Paypal set-up - Cost £0.00
Avactis free edition - £0.00

All the guy needs to do is start pushing the site.

Meanwhile, on my own site I am trialling Drupal/Ubercart to see if it can replace his Avactis storefront as it is way more expandable.