Starting up a website to sell things on

Clarita

Hi, I want to build a website to sell some of the jewellery I make. I don't really know anything about how to go about doing this. I guess I need to register a domain name and then pay for a host for the website.

Do I need to do these together or can they be done completely independently?

Anyone have any recomendations of a cheap way of having a website which will be able to have photos of products, a shopping basket feature, give a bill at the end and some way of being able to accept card payments?

Any help is gratefully accepted. Thanks!

crox

what about ebay to start with?

richt71

Clarita wrote:

Hi, I want to build a website to sell some of the jewellery I make. I don't really know anything about how to go about doing this. I guess I need to register a domain name and then pay for a host for the website.

Do I need to do these together or can they be done completely independently?

Anyone have any recomendations of a cheap way of having a website which will be able to have photos of products, a shopping basket feature, give a bill at the end and some way of being able to accept card payments?

Any help is gratefully accepted. Thanks!

Godaddy.com do a good deal for hosting $39.99 a year or $7.98 for 2 months renewable. You get a discounted domain @ $1.99 a year with hosting. As for your website I'd say £150-£200 it'll cost you a website with 3-5 items and paypal intregration. Try elance.com for web designers to bid for your website building.
Next you'll need promotion and in some ways this is more important that the website because you can have the best website but no one seeing it! Marketing costs should be somewhere between £150 (very basic) to £600 + a month. Adwords is a great way to advertise. You pay per visitor based on your keywords like 'jewellery'. Each click cost from a few pence up to £10+ dependant on popularity.

Clarita

In response to the suggestion of Ebay:
I didn't want to do that really as you have to pay them for each item every time you put it up for sale even if it doesn't sell and then you have to pay them a percentage. Plus you're up against so much tat on there. I'd just like to see if it's possible to set up a website that's not going to cost a fortune and see how it goes for say a year.

Clarita

richt71 wrote:

As for your website I'd say £150-£200 it'll cost you a website with 3-5 items and paypal intregration.

Do you mean £150-£200 to be able to sell just 3 to 5 items of jewellery! That's way more expensive than I'd consider. Thanks anyway

crox

Clarita wrote:

In response to the suggestion of Ebay:
I didn't want to do that really as you have to pay them for each item every time you put it up for sale even if it doesn't sell and then you have to pay them a percentage. Plus you're up against so much tat on there. I'd just like to see if it's possible to set up a website that's not going to cost a fortune and see how it goes for say a year.

Oh I couldn't agree more, but I just thought it might be idea to start on an auction site before you set your own site up. If your skills are up to it, you could develop the website yourself and use paypal to handle the transactions (less a fee of course)

Clarita

crox wrote:

Oh I couldn't agree more, but I just thought it might be idea to start on an auction site before you set your own site up. If your skills are up to it, you could develop the website yourself and use paypal to handle the transactions (less a fee of course)

Yeah, I've sold a few things on ebay but by the time you take off the listing fee and take into account that you're pretty much forced into only starting at 99p (otherwise the listing fee goes up), you don't get much in the end. Plus it's so much hassel and all looks so messy. It would be nice to be able to set it out how I want with as many photos as I want and stuff like that.

Clarita

I've been having a look around and https://www.ecom-hosting-solution.com have a package for £30 per year. Would this not cover what I wan't to do? (I don't really understand fully what it does cover but it has a free shopping cart add-in)

wonka

Get a cheap domain name from www.123-reg.co.uk (~£6 for 2 years)
Get free web hosting from www.jamroll.net (5 ad links at bottom of web page)
JamRoll can also quickly set up an e-commerce application for you using www.oscommerce.org - this gives you a "catalog" and shopping cart.
To take payments (inc. credit card payments) you can sign-up with PayPal.

Easy!

richt71

Godaddy.com offer a basic hosting and discounted domain package for £27 a year if you pay upfront for the year or £9 for 2 months including a years regristration of a domain. Design of a webpage with paypal intergration will cost you somewhere between £150 and £200. Elance.com is the place for web designers. Your biggest challenge on a budget is to get your website seen TBH. Adwords pay per click on your chosen word works well but can be expensive in popular area's. I'd say you need at least £150 a month budget dependant on cost of clicks. Then you've got search engine listing companies. Good ones will get you a good listing and bring free traffic from the likes of google but these companies charge a lot to do this for you £500+. There are however some cheap ones out there but in my experience most of the cheap search engine submission companies are useless!

buglawton

I rent space from easily.co.uk and loaded a standard free to use e-shop (called Cubecart) onto it which has a built in Paypal interface. The total annual running cost might be around £100/year (if you get a techie relative to install ti & fix things when they go wrong).

What richt71 above says is true: No web promotion and you might have a hard time gettting visitors. I tried the freelancer sites originally, trying to get a sensible offer to get the site optimized to get some Google traffic and just couldn't get a sensibly priced and trustworthy offer. In the end I read up on how to optimize things and did it myself. 4 months later the Google/Yahoo etc traffic started arriving.

Do you sell on markets? http://www.nmtf.co.uk/ do a deal that features your hotlink on their website (which has a reasonable Google pagerank) for £40/year and this might kickstart you into the search engines.