Ecommerce Platform & Payment Processing

[getmein]

I've decided to get a head start on my 2011 new years resolution - to setup myself as a merchant. Would appreciate advice from fellow acorners on a decent ecommerce platform/payment processing

Platform

Going to start with a small selection of products (less than 50) in 5 categories. I'm quite keen on having a slick checkout process and a platform that can be made seo friendly. Magento does seem to be mentioned alot - anyone got any experience with magento? Or should I be looking at something else for my needs?

Payment Processing

I'm thinking of either sagepay or using HSBC - will these integrate well with magento? For people using either of them would be very interested in hearing about your experience.

If anyone on the forum does this sort of development work please send me a PM.

 

[alex]

Great to hear you're taking the leap - I recently did the same, but on a self-build so can't advice platform wise.

As for payment, be careful with who you go for. In setting up I approached both HSBC and Sage. HSBC charge £20 p/m plus transaction charges, sage charge £30p/m plus charges. In addition Sage charge £120 per year and HSBC a £200 set-up. Furthermore HSBC require your own secured server plus PCI Compliance which is expensive. Basically the costs are hundreds/thousands per year before you've sold anything.

I went with PayPal - at the minute it is express checkout, but if you integrate Web Payments Pro (which I intend to do) users won't even know its PayPal, their invoice etc will say your company name and they won't have to leave your site if set up correctly. There is a monthly charge and the expensive PayPal fees, but if you're selling low volume it is much cheaper in the short run as there are no set up fees or PCI compliance needed.

Hope this helps.

Alex

 

[JMOT]

Read this. Fantastic rant about ecommerce platforms and how annoying they can be for good seo!

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/ecommerce-platforms-an-seos-nemesis.html

 

[monaghan]

PayPal certainly is attractive on low volume, most of our sales volume is on standing order or bank transfer so we've not had the need to set-up a merchant account. PayPal seems to be far more acceptable as a payment method these days (probably due to higher profile names offering it as a payment method).

As for ecommerce platform, it depends on how much work you want to do. You can take a hosting plan with Fantastico, click a few buttons and you can have oscommerce installed in 5 mins. I'm currently exploring Ubercart (on the Drupal CMS platform), this is more work, but seems far more customisable to my needs.

You will also want to consider how you will link the ecommerce platform to your accounts system, there doesn't seem to be much work done on this at the moment. I'm just in the process of writing a module for Ubercart to hook into my accounts to add customers & invoices in real time during the cart process. Other systems may export XML or CSV files for you to manually import into your accounts.

 

[patrickj]

I set up our own ecommerce site 12 months ago using Magento and i have to say it does the job and is very customisable.

Having done healthy £xxx,xxx turnover in first year we are now looking at going custom but Magento certainly served its purposes.

With regards merchants we use Barclays EPDQ which plugged straight into Magento and only downside with them (as well as worldpay etc) is the longer settlement time for paying you the funds (upto 60 days) as opposed a proper merchant account with your bank which settle in a few days.

Hope this helps and good luck

Patrick

 

[getmein]

Great to hear you're taking the leap - I recently did

I remember reading your post and that was another reason to get myself into gear.

You will also want to consider how you will link the ecommerce platform to your accounts system

I'm hoping that sagepay will link up with sageline 50 - will give them a call to find out.

Read this. Fantastic rant about ecommerce platforms and how annoying they can be for good seo!

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/ecommer...s-nemesis.html

Remeber reading that post too, although I suspect that relates to 'enterprise' level clients and systems. I'm planning something far less glam to start with.

Having done healthy £xxx,xxx turnover in first year we are now looking at going custom but Magento certainly served its purposes.

Thats certainly inspiring. What do you think a realistic budget is for a smallish magento setup?


Thanks very much for all the helpful replies - just feel the time has come to do some ecommerce for myself rather than for others.

 

[alex]

I remember reading your post and that was another reason to get myself into gear.

Well I'm glad it persuaded you to get going. I've been selling skate components on eBay for years and done okay out of it, but it is so much better putting money into your own site rather than eBay. The margin is higher and at the end of the day the value of the advertising is benefitting you, not others like eBay.

My aim is to get Griptape running flawlessly over the next 6-9 months then transfer across to my other skate domains. I'll always be happy to offer advice based on my experiences if you want it, but I'm no expert and there are certainly others on here with a better eCommerce background.

 

[GreyWing]

I use Worldpay, works out at £20 a month but I have done over 1/2 Million in sales over the last 6 years and zero chargebacks.

Wish they had an option to add a few more call back extra's to the account but have to start a new account to do that.

There are so many systems that will take worldpay, so easy to use on most shopping cart systems. I run Joomla's virtuemart and all goes very smoothly. One downside as mentioned is the settlement time, if cashflow is tight then waiting 5-6 weeks for settlement is a no-no for most businesses that sell high valued goods or have a high turnover.

But virtuemart will hook up to paypal, so maybe that could be a good way forward to start with?

All the best
Graeme

 

[spondishy]

I'm setting something up for the wife and have decided to go bigcommerce for the ecommerce site.

I'd appreciate advice on the payment processor though. I don't expect more than £2k sales a month for a while with orders in the £20-30 range. Any advice on who to choose?

Cheers

 

[techtimmy]

Although Magento does some useful features I would never ever ever recommend it to anyone. It's over complicated, fiddly, Community Edition is under supported, help forum is quiet, skinning is a pain, it's too large and the backend is slow. As you can probably tell, I hate it!

I've also found Sagepay to be staffed by monkeys so stear clear of them if you can.

 

[uknown]

As someone has already mentioned, bigcommerce.com is brilliant.

We're getting the own hosted version shortly to try and improve SEO even more than it already does.