Considering easily.co.uk

The Easily webcreator is quite limited, the template styles are really not that adventurous either, and dependent on your business I think you may find yourself very quickly frustrated at the lack of ability for this kind of package to grow with your business. £149 imho is not good value for their package - don't get me wrong, Easily are great, I bought my domains from them, I have had email accounts with them, but I also had their creator foc a few years ago when I bought other service from them, and I wasn't that impressed with it as a freebie, so I wouldn't pay for it.

I think it depends firstly on what your business is and what you want it to do, is it an ecommerce site that you want to sell from?

If you want to sell from it, give serious consideration to a hosted solution, with easy to use admin systems, a person to advise, regular updates to the package etc, concentrate on the business and let someone else worry about the technical building bit. They've done the hard work already and created templates that work, the problem with DIY is you don't know what you don't know until it goes horribly wrong. Better to have a well put together professional looking website, well SEO'd and storming to the top of google, than shouting in frustration at the site builder and trying to read up on allsorts of things you don't want to clutter your brain with imho

There are a few good hosted solution providers on here, awebapart and quikshop perhaps take a look at their solutions and PM them?

Have a look at uk2.net - their ecommerce will do the job for you it is the best hosted diy package that I found. They have a demo cart.

Now whether the hosters can do the job is another matter.

'Do your own site' - special offer of £5 a month at the moment - simply unbeatable if you are dipping your toes in to start with.
I'm more than satisfied with them.

If it is predominantly an online shop you want, then mrsite should be last on your list, it is the odd one out since its ecommerce features are little more than making use of the PayPal basket for external basket functionality. Most of the others on your list offer more advanced fully integrated online shops, most of them at least have an integrated basket.

UK2 use a commercial package called PinnacleCart, so you might find more information on this if you visit the PinnacleCart.com site.

Likewise, Easily use a hosting company only sitebuilder package called CM4ALL, so you might find more information on the CM4All.com site.

At your budget, another supplier to consider is store2go.net

Your choice of supplier may also depend on how many different types of products you want to sell, and how complex the product options are.

For your budget, I would concentrate on either UK2 or rentacart (if you go with rentacart use a .co.uk domain since they host in the US), mainly because their systems are based on tried and tested 'industry-standard' packages, PinnacleCart and ZenCart (ZenCart is a derivative of osCommerce), and if you decide to move away from the service provider in the future it is easier to buy/get those base systems and try to replicate your old shop and database on a new host.

eshopNewbie said:

I think Store2Go would fulfil my initial needs but can you explain the process on the design of the store layout?

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You will have to check the design process with each supplier, as it will be different with each supplier and will depend on the flexibility and constraints of each supplier's system.

eshopNewbie said:

Thanks for your replies...

Mr.Site £30 all in but low bandwidth & webspace - I have looked at the sample websites created and can find only a couple of 'decent' designed sites

UK2 £9.95 per month isn't too bad but I cannot find any info on creating and customising the site.

Rentacart - £40 a year based on zencart - looks the best bet at the moment

Many thanks

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If you use MR SITE it is not £30 it would be £60, because they charge £30 to provide you with a shoppong cart.
Mr Site don't actually sell you any software the £30 is for a domain name, & password access to their site. (the box just contains a on disk manual and a password.) You can pick up the MR SITE box on amazon for £17.

ann-marie

eshopNewbie
What products and number of products are you planning on selling? You seem to be going to a lot of hassle trying to find different do-it-yourself solutions, all of which are just currently stopping you from getting on with the important thing - getting up and running and trading.

In all honesty, if you don't have the experience and understanding of these packages on the DIY route then please take it from some of us who've been there and done that and don't waste precious time and money (because every hour you spend on this is money lost where you could be up and trading) trying to find the perfect DIY soloution.

The reason there are skilled hosted solution people out there who are resellers of the various or own custom products & web designers, is because trying to cobble together something has a whole myriad of issues, not least of which is protecting customer details, card security and protection from hackers and these things need a greater level of understanding than just adding a cart system.

Not every hosted solution ties you into a long term contract, and whilst there is a set up cost involved, this does at least mean you have a shop up and running very quickly without the stress and hassle of DIY.

If you need a level of hand-holding and business support some providers also can do this, for example my website is hosted with Internet Retailer they help shopkeepers find suppliers, trade shows, and have other added value services available for when you know you business works and you can afford to spend some money - such as press releases, link campaigns, customised logo design etc.

I started out on the standard shop design layout, which essentially looked like this http://www.teedoff.co.uk/ or this http://www.handbagshop.tv/, it's a well optimised design, customers love it cos it's clean and clear and I stormed up google extremely quickly. The admin functionality is great and it's easy to understand and use.

I did notice from the offers page that there is currently an offer on for UKBF members so for £49.95 (instead of the usual £79.95 I paid) you could have a ready made shop up and running in a matter of days, you do then have a monthly fee of £29.95, but you get 2 weeks free initially so that you can see if it works for you, and there is no fixed contract so you can cancel at anytime if you wanted.

Admittedly it's not as cheap as the systems you've looked at, but as they say you get what you pay for, and the DIY route is more likely to lead to a site which you rapidly outgrow if your business takes off in the way you really want.

Thanks Boho, that's a great summary of how to start, getting up and running and what to expect. Most enlightening for us absolute begineers!

Thank you, always happy to help
As they say, we all have to start somewhere and I know from experience that some things when it comes down to it really aren't worth the perceived money saving - not when you factor in the time it took to get you there.