Ecommerce site

Happydays_56

Hi,

Hoping for some advice please

I want to start an online store but having no programming skills whatsoever I'm looking at the likes of BigCommerce, EKM, Bluepark or Shopify as I understand that they are template driven.

I would like Paypal/credit/debit card payment options

Around 500 items would suffice.

I see most do trials where I assume you try out a design and put on a few items ?? Is this then visable to the public ?

My chosen name is available as a .co.uk does that come as part of the monthly fee and is it yours to keep as long as you keep paying ?

Sorry if these seem basic questions, I've tried a google search but seem to get American sites that seem to have a bias toward one company i.e it's probably owned by them to advertise.

Thank you

Double_V

Hi yeah

Your name which is called, domain name comes with a yearly fee. And yes it is yours as long as you keep paying.
Setting up eCommerce is fairly easy.

You can use your own shopping cart. So you don't pay a monthly fee to these companies. e.g opencart, joomla, woocommerce etc.

ballisticbrian

Surely if you use your own cart software so you don't pay for an ecommerce site, you still need to pay for the domain name and hosting which costs about the same?

RFW

.It depends how and what you're listing. I use Tictail which is largely free. You can hook up a domain for 1 Euro per month.
Payment gateways are Paypal and Stripe.
Unlimited products.
It's worth having a play with, there may be things you need to do that would make you want to go elsewhere but I have it looking pretty sleek and working quite well. I recently encountered two guys who had paid £20,000 for shop website and it really didn't look any better than mine that cost about a tenner.
The only fees are for some add-on apps, I use a Google feed app and one or two others but it still comes in at under £10/month.

Shopify have their own free to use site GoSpaces.

I posted a thread about both a while back. https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5266193

For paid sites I'd say Shopify was the most user friendly. They all have to be promoted so if it was me I'd go with Tictail to try and then move if you need to.

deskhelp

Take a look at magento Ecommerce script as well, And yes you will require hosting, Domain and get this application installed to upload your products and use it.

Happydays_56

Thanks everyone,

Do Tictail and magneto need any programing skills ? are the sites you can build viewable on mobiles ?

I thought the likes of Bigcommerce, EKM etc included SEO or does that mean they are search engine friendly. I must admit that bit baffles me.

I'm looking into this because I want to do it full time, register as a business etc and from selling my own private stuff on Ebay, I'm warying of the "tap" effect on there where you'll sell a few items over a couple of days then nothing for a week. As if your items aren't being seen, then the same thing happens again.

I can't have that if I'm relying on it for a sole income

RFW

Happydays_56 wrote: »

Thanks everyone,

Do Tictail and magneto need any programing skills ? are the sites you can build viewable on mobiles ?

I thought the likes of Bigcommerce, EKM etc included SEO or does that mean they are search engine friendly. I must admit that bit baffles me.

Tictail can be used straight away, same sort of use as Ebay, upload picture(s), write title, write description, add price and quantity and that's good to go.
Magento requires a lot of other work, I couldn't make out what I needed to do to get it to work.
As for search, I think the paid ones have a little built in searching but not enough and certainly not enough for the fees. I'd say use Tictail and pay £30 per month for Adwords (you can usually find somewhere between £50 and £100 codes for new users).

I'd suggest having a play with Tictail, it is totally free, so see how it works, even if you don't end up using it it will give you some knowledge if you move to one of the others.

paddyrg

Also possibly worth a look are RomanCart - based in Bath http://www.romancart.com/ so you're not having to explain to Americans all the time, but share operating hours etc.

fishybusiness

Bigcommerce say they have some built in SEO, I found it lacking. You really need to think in terms of doing your own SEO, optimising keywords and phrases and creating your own descriptions rather than copying and pasting from elsewhere.

Magento...a wonderful tool if you can get in to it. It needs a government health warning......I spent 4 months on and off getting Magento running, working with a template I liked, getting it to talk to other tools. Even silly things are complicated to non web people - add a new module through MagentoConnect, if it fails, site is down, what do you do? Delete the maintenance flag.....software doesn't tell you, Google does.

Paypal and Stripe should cover your payments, most hosted platforms will cover them, if not free modules are available.

Bluepark is a nice setup, UK based, busy forum, many happy users.....

Happydays_56

Ok magento, or magneto as I called it above by mistake is a no no thenif it's that complicated.

Just watched the Roman cart vid that adds the shopping prog to a wordpress site. As I've been looking around I've read a couple of times about wordpress having security issues. Is that true ?

RFW

Happydays_56 wrote: »

Ok magento, or magneto as I called it above by mistake is a no no thenif it's that complicated.

Just watched the Roman cart vid that adds the shopping prog to a wordpress site. As I've been looking around I've read a couple of times about wordpress having security issues. Is that true ?

I don't know but I do know that Wordpress can be as complicated as Magento. You can probably find more people to help you with it but it isn't as straightforward as some of the others.