A newbie to E-commerce

[JonnyC]

Hello everyone,

My wife is hoping to setup an ecommerce website for her accessories boutique.

She would require a website to showcase approx 40 products with the ability to have multiple images/zoom facility for each product. It would also need to incorporate some sort of blog for details of fairs etc

I was speaking to a local web design company in Northern Ireland who use Magneto as a management tool for the site. Could anyone advise on whether it is as good as the web suggests, what are the drawbacks if any? (annual costs etc).

Also could anyone possibly advise on Merchant Tools such as WorldPay, Paypal etc, there seems to be a number of pros/cons for each.

Although I run my own business, researching ecommerce solutions has my head fried, if anyone can offer any advice to a beginner to ecommerce it would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Jonny

 

[sanjiv]

I have never personally used Magento. CRE Loaded is very good. I have however heard that Magento is really good.

For payment gateways, PayPal is only good to leave as an option for users to pay with. You should use another gateway for most payments. SecureTrading are supposed to be very good but I don't think that they are that well heard of. A lot of people reccomend SagePay however some people have had bad experiences too. I guess its a bit like marmite. Worldpay are supposed to be good.

 

[webhostuk]

Hello,

Magento is really good E-commerce script..you just need to make sure your host it on good server with best hardware ..as memory requirement is high for magento, its a bit heavy script.

Not all servers will be able to handle it.

 

[bottlemaster]

I've used PayPal for over 300 personal eBay transactions, and never had any problems. I've yet to use it for an eCommerce sale, but I'm hoping it will go just as smoothly.

 

[Paul Norman]

Again, although I have not personally used Magneto, it is a fairly good product, and one of the better of the 'off the shelf' ones.

As to a gateway, do not go with Paypal alone. SecureTrading, as mentioned above, are recommended by both HSBC and LLoyds, and may be others too! It is better, technically, than Sage Pay, but as they only affects the person coding the website, it doesnt matter too much!

 

[wholesalecity]

I suggest PayPal.
Our company supported PayPal, Western Union, Money gram and T/T
You need to pay service fee to PayPal.
But if your use the three others, the customers pay the fee.

 

[shopintegrator]

Hi Jonny,

For a site with around 40 products you could use WordPress to build an effective ecommerce website for this number of products. WordPress was originally for bloggers but is now powerful enough to build whole sites where a blog is just one part of it. It is easy to use as well so your wife would be able to get to grips with it and do more of the maintainance of the online boutique herself.

There are lots of free or paid for design templates available so your sure enough to find one that fits the look you are after.

You could then use a WordPress ecommerce plugin to add in ecommerce to your WordPress site.

 

[florenceij]

Hi as shopintegrator said you can use either wordpress, joomla, oscommerce/zencart/creloaded, prestashop and award winning magento. Magento will cost more to design and develop and would need like webhostuk suggested a dedicated or virtual server hosting plan.

To find out which will work best need to know her budget and what features she will need on the website i.e promo codes, loyalty points, sales report ability to track incomplete orders, cross sells of products, email newsletter, down loadable product, demo or trailers etc

With regards to merchant tools Paypal is great to start off with and you can always change once she has a trading history of transactions. They have two options one is paypal website payment standard where customers are directed to paypal website to make payment and upon completion get redirected to your website just like ebay. You pay paypal a percentage of each transaction.

Paypal website pro allows you take payment on your website for a monthly fee of £20 and percentage of each transaction to do this you now have to be PCI DSS compliant. ( can explain this to you in more details later)

Worldpay offer similar but no longer as widely recognized as paypal. To use worldpay to process website payment on your site you will need a merchant account and will have to pay set up fees etc.

I hope this helps. Feel free to contact me if you have any more questions.

 

[owas]

hi, I have used pretty much all the big e software stuff, and have now started using prestashop. Its working great is easy to use both admin side and customer side and has all of the above and more that you would like, paypal so far is working great with it.
Its quite new so there arent many templates around, buts again not to hard to change.
here my latest site made using prestashop, if you do decide to install it let me know and I will be happy to help out, at a lose end until i get some work so may as well make myself useful.
Owain

flubbertoys.co.uk

 

[davek17]

Try Tigercommerce.co.uk

It's a little bit basic but its cheap, has a non commital subscription and you can get up and running very quickly with it. It supports a lot of payment gateways too.

DaveK17

 

[edmondscommerce]

another vote for Magento...

CRE Loaded is also good

I've never been a fan of CMS systems with bolt of eCommerce - if you want eCommerce then just get something dedicated to that.

 

[JonnyC]

Many Thanks Folks for your replies, I shall dig deeper this evening and no doubt return with more questions.

All the best,

Jonny

 

[Rade_CNR]

We find the combination of Magento and SagePay to work very well together. You can also include Paypal as a choice of payment gateway as it is growing in mainstream popularity.

I agree with others that hosting needs to be carefully thought out. Make sure whoever you use has suitable back-up policies and resilience. Ecommerce is by definition more demanding that any normal website.