Which e commerce hosting site is best for low value items?

Mrs_Pepperpots

Hi all, just after some advice, I need to set up my own e-commerce website, I currently sell on Etsy, which obvs has selling fees etc. My items are of small value (starting at £4 each) which website builder is the best & cheapest fees? I’ve looked at Spotify, but think their prices are too much for my products? I have over 100 products so must be a site that supports unlimited listings. I'm not particuarly web savvy so don't think wordpress would be a good solution?

Any advice on what you other small businesses use would be helpful.

martindow

The advantage of sites like Etsy and Ebay is that your products get seen and then sell.  The difficulty of setting up your website is getting traffic to it to make sales.  A new site is likely to be almost invisible in practical terms in google once it is picked up and listed.

Costs are involved in running a website such as hosting fees and your will need someone to take the payments.  Paypal can be used or you can set up a merchant account to take cards although that is likely to involve monthly fees and a percentage or fixed fee per transaction. 

There is value in having a site of your own but it is probably going to be no cheaper than Etsy unless you sell a lot through it.

Sandtree

There are two models for charging, you have the likes of Shopify and Wix where they have a “builder” and their pricing often has limits like the number of items. Alternatively you have the thousands of other webhosts who charge a flat fee and have one click installation of various freeware/open source ecommerce solutions that you can get free/cheap skins for.

The later does have a learning curve but its frequently not as bad as those selling builders would have you believe and extra costs only kick in if you start to have masses of traffic to your site. 

A number of webhosts offer free trials or money back guarantees and so it may be worth while seeing if the likes of the free PrestaShop or similar is as scary as you think they’ll be.