cms e-commerce website / hosting

[Stephen]

as domain sales for .co.uk on my portfolio are slow in the last several months

looking to put some of my effort and resources into developing some of the domains into websites were i can acquire stock at wholesale prices - repackage - add as many usp's as i can and sell to my targeted audience for that product - the traditional business model

but to make it work need an easy,quick and cost effective solution of building an acceptable website that will be transactional and editable

previously when down this route quotes were always about £2000 per site before you start

has anybody got advice on this area please?

as a last resort even considering building my own cms (content management system) e-commerce (shops / services / appointments / downloads)
solution hosted with a 3rd party supplier
and offering it to others, if i cannot find the solution i seek

stephen

 

[accelerator]

Whenever I see people talking about e-commerce, I see Shopify mentioned. I don't have first hand experience of it but it might be worth investigating.

Rgds

 

[orchardapple]

take a look at woocomerce, simply as anything to install and plenty support around the net if you need anything changed or built for you

 

[Adam H]

Generally there isnt a fit all solution, depends on how many products your planning on having, what payment methods you require, how capable you are among other things.

Any 3rd party that will still be around to support you a couple of months down the line and be reliable will charge you £1500+ and so they should, but there are more cost effective ways of doing it if you put the time in or/and are not fussy.

For example :

1. Woocommerce ( wordpress ) + premium theme and a handful of plugins can be ideal for a small cart with minimal products. Added bonus that wordpress is highly customisable anyway.

2. Magento + Premium theme , more complicated but scalable to large scales of products.

3. Open cart , not a fan of but similar to above.

4. Paid monthly hosted solutions such as shopify.

All of which you could do your self for minimal setup costs, if the shop then starts to do well you can invest more time and effort into making it more custom.

You can always get everything setup and hire a dev to customise a premium theme for a couple of hundred quid and support the site if/when is needed.

 

[redbird]

3. Open cart , not a fan of but similar to above.

I manage several shops and have used Prestashop (not that well known but suited mine and clients needs at the time) for them all until about 6 months or so ago when I moved to OpenCart for one project that wasn't suitable for Prestashop because of the way it uses images....

I have to say that I am now a convert and will only be using OpenCart for the foreseeable future. The main benefit for me is vQmod (research it) which allows for customisation without affecting the core code which means updates are much easier than my heavily customised Prestashop stores....

An example of a recent OpenCart build is Family Name

Dave

 

[Skinner]

I used prestashop a few times, I found it somewhat awkward in how it does things, really nice and smooth tho.

Magento needs hosting company otimisation to stop it running like a paralytic drunk geordie, if your on a VPS or dedicated, or other self managed, I would avoid magento. If your host doesn't optimise for it, I'd avoid it also. It is however what many of the big boys use, on a dedicated server, with some customisation, it will steam roller everything in its path.

I have even used simple wp-cart plugins when dealing with a dozen or so products.

Really a case of right tool for the right job.

 

[monaghan]

WooCommerce is simple to install and very flexible and there are loads of affordable WP developers out there if you want to make it do something different. Many themes have WC support already built into them.

Magento is a real pain unless you really understand how it all hangs together. I've done a few things with it and fixed other people's code, it's not a simple beast, but once understood you can do lots with it.

I've worked with a few Shopify customers and the API is quite flexible and there are quite a number of apps that can be configured to run with it. Romancart is another hosted option, but didn't seem as flexible.

Ecwid is also a popular and reasonably flexible system that you can drop into an existing site or blog.

OpenCart / ZenCart are also options to take a look at, but you'll need to do a lot of reading & working through code if you want to extend them.

Best bet is to build a couple of systems on a local test box and see what works best for you.

For selling a small number of items that you will manage, pack and ship yourself, personally I'd go with something simple like WooCommerce.

 

[donton]

I use Shopify on three busy ecommerce sites and I can't rate it highly enough.

It's free when you first sign up while your store is in development, then once your site goes "live" you can choose a paid plan. Off the top of my head I paid $1000 to a guy on Elance for a unique design and I've just paid for the odd tweak here and there as time has gone by.

Shopify gets a big "thumbs up" from me!

 

[Stephen]

no home grown uk solution?

thanks very much for the posts, they are very useful

surprised there has been no home grown uk solutions?

 

[Adam H]

surprised there has been no home grown uk solutions?

Probably because you hinted at not wanting to go down the £2000+ route and wanted a quick and easy solution, no ones going to give you an option to use a bespoke setup with out charging appropriately, anything that anyone needs to be built to a good standard i doubt you will find for less than £2k.

Most bespoke shopping carts ive seen over the years, some costing 5k+ are sub standard crap as well so you need to have a clear outline of clean, modern coding standards which is scalable and customisable should your site take off.

Hence why many opt for Magento or Wordpress solutions which are well supported and easy to find developers for at a drop of a hat.

 

[splashweb]

Whichever way you go I would make sure it's mobile friendly, and test a few sample sites using Google's PageSpeed Insights tool.

 

[monaghan]

Whichever way you go I would make sure it's mobile friendly

Define mobile friendly! I find far too many sites want me to view their "mobile site" and make me have to click individual links to see each bit of product data despite the fact that I have a decent screen (1280*768) and have already selected the "give me the desktop site" link on the landing page earlier.

More and more mobile devices have nearly as good a visual capability as a low end laptop these days so don't just look for "android" or "ipad/iphone" and force the basic mobile layouts.

 

[splashweb]

No one size fits all of course, but a good starting point for "defining" mobile friendly is whether G are happy with it, hence my suggestion for testing using PageSpeed Insights.

Essentially what my research is telling me is to use a responsive single column design that's able to adapt to view port sizes using a combination of flexible source code (primarily div's) and a single CSS. I don't see a requirement for having more than one version of a site.

I'm about to implement this across my own site's, I'm sure others have gone further already.

 

[monaghan]

A responsive site is the way to go in my mind for both maintainability and user experience. Bootstrap is an easy solution to drop into a reasonably coded existing site or to build from scratch.