Ecommerce online shop

[Rich1880]

Hi All

I have been trading as a small business for a little while and now am at the stage where I need a website but also want to get a few items into an online shop. As this is early days I need to keep the monthly cost down as low as possible as the online shop side may not work. Can anyone suggest any ecommerce packages that would get me off the ground and that are reasonable and easy to use, I have no real webdesign experience.

Any help would really be appreciated.

Thanks

Richard

 

[Tricky1]

Have a look at eshop for wordpress and if it's any good send me a pm.

Richard

 

[orchardapple]

Good find, anyone using any of these templates?

Esp the payment handling side of things??

I have a few smaller sites in the pipeline for 6-10 products that would fit this style

 

[Rich1880]

Thanks for the response, does the recommended site host the domain? I took a look at 123reg and they have an all in one package, but I know there are poor reviews for 123 reg

 

[accelerator]

I would suggest also asking this question at the sitepoint.com forums. If you take a look at the forum, you'll see the Magento solution gets recommended a lot, although I don't have first hand experience of this.

Rgds

 

[Tricky1]

Thanks for the response, does the recommended site host the domain? I took a look at 123reg and they have an all in one package, but I know there are poor reviews for 123 reg

You would need to use your own hosting as it is wordpress theme...

I would suggest also asking this question at the sitepoint.com forums. If you take a look at the forum, you'll see the Magento solution gets recommended a lot, although I don't have first hand experience of this.

Rgds

Magento has a massive learning curve and for only a few products as per Rich1880 request, I wouldn't recommend using it. I do use it myself and develop sites for others, but by the time you grasped the basics you could have your handful of products uploaded to eshop, or prestashop which is another alternative and already started taking orders.

Richard

 

[Admin]

You could also try ShopperPress at PremiumPress.com

I love their templates and they are very responsive to emails when I need to ask something.

Admin

 

[Ashton]

Shopp is by far the best wordpress commerce plugin I have used.

Its brilliant. $55 single site license.

 

[accelerator]

Magento has a massive learning curve and for only a few products as per Rich1880 request, I wouldn't recommend using it. I do use it myself and develop sites for others, but by the time you grasped the basics you could have your handful of products uploaded to eshop, or prestashop which is another alternative and already started taking orders.

Sorry, having re-read his post I think I was a bit quick to mention this. Magento is probably only suitable for serious developers.

The other thing that crosses my mind for ease of use is eBay Shops.

Rgds

 

[Rich1880]

Thanks for all of the responses. I just dont have the skills or understanding to how I would develop on wordpress and then to upload to a host, at this stage I think using an online shop would be my best bet so that I can link it up to paypal. I do like ebay but increasingly their costs are just getting too much and for advertising I want to give an overview of the business.

Is it easy to use wordpress etc, I have used frontpage before some time ago but didnt do much with it and it wasnt an online store.

 

[monaghan]

A lot of cPanel hosts will use something called Fantastico which will allow you to install a variety of things with just a few simple forms and button clicks. There are also other simple installers with other hosting platforms.

You could try oscommerce or zencart as these are quite simple to get going with and have PayPal payment modules and such like, they run standalone so no need to work out how to run Wordpress or other CMS. A number of our customers have installed either of these.

 

[Rich1880]

I stumbled across ekmpowershop, anyone used it before? also just a general question. If I used someone like eknpowershop and pay them their £19.99 a month. How do I then get it online, I assume I need someone to host it and then direct it across to ekmpowershop? who should I use as a host?

 

[grantw]

I stumbled across ekmpowershop, anyone used it before? also just a general question. If I used someone like eknpowershop and pay them their £19.99 a month. How do I then get it online, I assume I need someone to host it and then direct it across to ekmpowershop? who should I use as a host?

It's a hosted solution by the looks of it.

Grant

 

[buffalo]

Here's a free solution that I am currently considering - it integrates with wordpress:

http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/