Advice on E-Shop

[Comspec]

I having been playing around with the idea of an e-shop for quite a while now, as a sideline to my business which is in the B2B & B2H services sector. Since cutting down my job to 3 days per week I have been developing my business and intend to go full-time in the next 2-3 months.

I would intend to have a website for my company services, which i will get developed soon & an e-shop for supplying goods directly. I would want to keep both sites separate, but with links on both sites to each other. The reason for this has been thought through & i do not want to put my clients off with an e-shop every time they want info from my services web-site. It will form my main business, with the web-shop a sideline to fill in some hours of the day.

Now, my main questions:

1) I have a business account with Paypal, but am toying with the idea of a merchant account for accepting credit card payments. If i go down this route, can I still accept Paypal payments? I would want to offer a printable proforma invoice for postal payments, On Account (to agreed users), credit/debit card, paypal and any other options i may be able to use. Is this possible & will the numerous off-the-shelf sites offer this? I have been looking at ecom-solutions.co.uk as a possiblity.

2) I had hoped to utilise drop-shippers to supply some of my goods, but i have since decided they are not offering value-for-money and i have decided to purchase my own stock (well for most items anyway). What pitfalls should I be watching out for here? I am aware that i will realistically need to send everything recorded/courier in order to prove their delivery, but do these off-the-shelf packages offer much by way of postage rates? Can i for example, mark items as a particular postage category & have this added to the bill automatically?

3) Ebay - should i even consider using it to promote my site & do they have any problem with me selling items which have a link to my web-store on them? Should i use ebay's own shop option?

4) I have considered having a forum on my site - to allow users to discuss technical questions relating to the products (some would be IT-based products). Is this available off-the-shelf & are these any good? I would not want to have it on my site if it distracted from the main site itself.

I apologise for the length of this post, and would appreciate any advice you can give. I am not really ready to purchase my site yet (1-2 months away), but i have numerous suppliers on-board (from previous contacts) and would have an idea of the goods i intend to sell - there would be anywhere from 100-200 different items, categorised over maybe 10-15 categories.

Regards
Mark

[falconinternetlimited]

Mark,

Good luck with the business and going full-time!

Just a couple of insights from me. if you can afford to have a merchant account I would implement it. Paypal can get a negative response from some purchasers (especially purchases who are not necessarily used to purchasing on the web).

I can recommend PHPBB if you are looking for good forum software. iIt's a free download, very easy to install and configure with a lot of templates. www.phpbb.com

The only thing I would say about a forum (from experience) is that there's nothing worse than seeing a forum with few members or posts. Therefore if you go down that route be prepared to bully family, friends, business colleagues and acquaintances into registering and posting.

Above all though, make sure that the forum is truely relevent to your site.

With regards to eBaym there is another post and thread about this and the concensus of that thread is to use eBay to get rid of end of line stock rather than use it as a core selling tool. You can put links to your site from eBay so it's always possible to use it as a marketing tool.

Good Luck!

Rupert

[GNU]

I would agree with the previous post regardigng the use of a forum.

If you use osCommerce there is a feedback section for products, similar to that used by E-Buyer etc. This may be amore appropriate. Even this is a double edged sword, as you may get negative feedback.

Personally I dont like paypal.

I have not used them, but protx seem quite competitively priced, if you can get a review from someone who has used them it may be worth further investigation.

[SillyJokes]

Mark, your post covers so many aspects of the e-shop process and when I read it I can see it hardly scratches the surface.

This chap here (http://www.tigertom.com/ecommerce-consultant.shtml)can answer all your questions, but he charges £6000 for the priviledge, however, I wouldn't be surprised that if he could genuinely answer all the questions you are going to need to ask it will be well worth it.

Here's my free advice

Don't bother with a forum, you'll have enough to do without spending time moderating it.
Don't buy too much stock, only buy a little, you can always get more but it's hard to shift too much and a drain in your cashflow.
Talk to Royal Mail business customer service about postage rates.
Don't expect to make a hundred orders a day for quite some time.

[Comspec]

Thanks folks for all the replies.

I have been putting quite a bit of thought into this lately & reading up on as much as possible. I have an IT background, but more hardware & networking infrastructure, though I am usually able to pick up anything i need quickly.

I am worried about going with one of these 'off-the-shelf' packages incase it doesn't give me what I need, but i am rather hesitant to spend any major money until i dip my feet for a while.

As said previously, I will intend to provide a service in N Ireland to Homes/Businesses & this will be the main part of my business.

That is to say, if i ever get to actually leave my job before pension age. I gave my notice in February, but have now agreed to stay 3 days per week until end august, though at an increased rate :) It is now becoming a standing joke with colleagues, who think I am stuck forever.

Me, though realistic, am intensely loyal & would not leave them in the gooey stuff. Good chance to have a wage while i build my business i thought.

[franco_24]

Some good sound advice here. I go along with GNU and the recommendation for OS Commerce. I have used it with some success and it is highly configureable and allows overseas users, multiple postage rates, comments, recommended top selling goods, features. The list is endless. In fact it delivers far better results than many of the fee based software packages.

Anyone who finds a really good drop shipper please let me know but I agree they are mostly a complete waste of time and want you to pay to register and then try and sell you goods that you can find much cheaper elsewhere.

One word of warning. I come from an IT background so I know how to use these things and set them up and manipulate them. If you are a novice, have no idea what a MySQL database is and are not internet/computer savvy then you might like to save tearing your hair out and buy something out of the box. A very simple one I have used before is Fast Cart but its not as good as OS Commerce and has much less features but simplicity to use. ( best place is probably ebay ).

On the subject of PayPal I have mixed feelings. On the one hand they are not cheap but you don't have monthly charges and the level of protection I have to say is superior to that offered by the banks. I used a major banks credit card machine and even with the code 10 checks they offer no guarantees whatsoever. Yes. Thats true. Don't be duped and read the small print. Fraud with merchant accounts is your problem and not theirs. I found out after losing 3k to a London credit card scam syndicate. They were using stolen cards and had all the right information. It is one of the dangers of trading on the net. Trust no one.

I have set up quite a few shopping carts for customers in the past. Some of the best scripts I have obtained from hotscripts.com and I have tweaked and changed them beyond recognition for various customer websites. It is easy to spend hours and hours of time energy doing this but the most important aspect is the marketing. So many times I have seen shopping carts costing thousands of pounds just sit there earning no income.

Whatever you spend on the shopping cart your marketing and time and effort needs to be tenfold on the driving of customers to the new site. Ebay is good for that so set up a shopping cart on ebay and use it to sell and then resell them the benefits of using your own site. Use pay per click on Google if you have high value products but set a daily limit or the marketing costs will spiral.

Either do it yourself ( if you are experienced ) or pay someone to make sure that your website optimisation and meta tags are as they should be and that you get listed highly in the search engines. This is an art and very time consuming. It is the reason so many shopping carts end up being a waste of time for their owners. Establishing a successful shopping cart is tough work and not for the faint hearted. I must have built around 40 or 50 shopping cart based websites and emphasised the marketing on every occassion and yet only 4 or 5 of these sites are still going strong. It's a tough market out there for shopping carts. Don't let anyone tell you any different.

Hope that helps. Don't let me put you off though. Its worth it if you can make it work!

:smile:

[BazaarBuilder]

Excellent advice Franco.

At the end of the day free shopping carts like osc etc are great providing you have the mysql and scripting skills to manage on your own when things don't go just the way you wanted. If you dont have the skills or the time yourself to trouble shoot mysql and other coding issues then the benefits of free initial cost can fast turn into a big bill from your web developer for 'support'.

Initial cost of setting up the site (and maintaining it) will in the long term make up only 20% or so of the total cost of the online business. The remainder will be made up of your sales and marketing efforts.

Good luck!

[Comspec]

Thanks for the info guys - more for me to think about.

I have practically settled on my products and what i actually want to sell. Now it is just a matter of deciding on what ECommerce site i will use.

I would be happy enough to use OSCommerce, but i would want a website which is customised to suit my products/company image, also i would require set costs as i would be starting this as a sideline to my main business and would not want to spend too much initially.

Are there any good off-the-shelf packages offering website, domain name reg, hosting, etc all in one package? I have looked a quite a few EKMPowershop, EasyWebIt, Puresilva, etc, but am struggling to settle on one.