website help

save-a-lot

if you need any help just send me a PM

skim

I'd go down the route of using one of the shops you can buy.
I've used http://www.x-cart.com for a couple of major high st retailers & had no problems. Cost for X-cart gold is $200 - not worth messing about trying to do your own thing for that sort of money.

[Deleted User]

nic-pink wrote: »

I have just started a company with my husband and we have a physical shop but we would also like a website where we can sell our products. I don`t mind paying for it (name, hosting,etc) but would like to build it myself as we are now skint after stocking the shop. I have contacted somebody who was recommended by the federation of small business rep regarding building our website but their prices were way out of our league at the mo (they ranged from £1,500 - £25,000) but what worried me is they said you were paying for their expertise in ensuring your website came up near the top in search engine results now I`m worried that if I design it myself no one is gonna be able to find it because i haven`t used their service - I guess what I`m asking is, is there a way to get your website near the top of search results in search engines?
Also who would you recommend for setting up a web shop?
thanks.

I have helped out a couple of small businesses/shops and have found usually the best solution is to start with an eBay shop, due to the amount of people that can find your products on their. And it is a very cheap way of getting started.

One customer even ended up shutting their own shop, because they ended up selling more online through their eBay shop.

You could also look at http://www.store2go.net/, a 200 item store for £2.08 per month. Another customer found this very succesful and a lot cheaper then getting a web designer.

Thanks

Griogair

these carts are probably great, but mals-e is free so for me, the best option for a new website,where sales will be less predictable at first

nic-pink

hi, everybody thanks for all the input. I`ve decided to go with save-a-lot`s recommendation of scriptlance and have been pleasantly surprised how reasonable the prices were. I have been contacted by a programmer who is recommending building a website that uses miva merchant this would cost about $30 a month but it has an inbuilt facility to accept online payments and it is pretty reasonable rates (25 cents per transaction) I have looked at paypal but I think they are too expensive as some transactions they take nearly 4.5% but on some of our items the markup is only 10%. What are your views on the pros and cons of miva merchant, are there any cheaper alternatives?
thanks
p.s I`ve applied for a refund with servage.net (fingers crossed I get it, I will not make any more rash decisions late at night again)

save-a-lot

Hi

I use fuzioned.com for my hosting, small company, brilliant customer service.

AntonUK2

Hi Nic-Pink,

Regarding your first question about getting your website higher up search listings the best thing to do is read up on 'SEO practices' there are millions of ways to 'search engine optimize' your site for a better rank. What I do with my site is simply exchange links with other high ranking sites i.e. they put your URL on their homepage and you do the same for theirs - Search Engines love it (clear example is PC World, scroll to the bottom of the page and look at there other websites for different countries).

-Now for the lame plug- If you want to setup a cost effective e-commerce shop but not sure how to go about doing it have a look at UK2's offerings. We offer a range of website wizards and templates that would help you get your online shop up and running.

/PM/EMAIL/Smoke Signal me for more info. Hope this helps. Anton


Uk2 'Bigger Upper' Section:
1,000,000 Domains Sold
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Badger_Lady

Just to go back to the point about Search Engine Optimisation - yes, you can optimise any site, but having that expertise when building the site makes it far easier!

A search engine will always favour a clearly constructed website that is DDA compliant (accessible) with good URLs. Any SEO expert that is handed a badly designed website can improve its ranking but would ideally like it to be rewritten!

But it's not hard to do - spend some time researching SEO (Google sometimes run seminars which are the best way to learn if you can get a place), and work it into your design. This is very important for an online retail business.