Choosing an ecommerce solution

[amac]

I wouldn't do ecommerce with a CMS starting out, there's a lot of pitfalls not least PCI compliance and general security. I would go for one of the popular hosted options e.g. Shopify, BigCommerce etc - their pricing is ok (though not so much with larger transaction volumes) plus they are very easy to design/operate.

 

[Faevilangel]

I wouldn't do ecommerce with a CMS starting out, there's a lot of pitfalls not least PCI compliance and general security. I would go for one of the popular hosted options e.g. Shopify, BigCommerce etc - their pricing is ok (though not so much with larger transaction volumes) plus they are very easy to design/operate.

You only need to worry about PCI compliance if you take the payment on your site, if the customer is sent to the payment providers website then you don't have too.

 

[tabish]

Hello everybody, i am new here. Could i ask about best way to increase my e-sale? Here is my story:
My company is placed in Poland, we producing uniqe metal juliet balconies and other railings. I try to find my customers also in U.K., first what comes to my mind was e-bay. So i have some listings on ebay and ebay-shoop as trade mark "Brodzinski_Manufactory" but i cant estabish my sale on rewarding level. Is there any other way to boost my sale or could some on promote my products on U.K. market for the future profit reward? I realy dont know reality of U.K. market and mentality of customers. I lookin for some on who is familiar with u.k. marketing secrets. For now my sale is like 1-2 juliet balcony per week, i would love to increase it by duble or triple.
If you have some advise for me, go ahead. I dont looking for cheep advertisement so i wont pase any links to my products. If some one i curious what we offer feel free to ask.
Thank you and frogive me my english.
Radoslav

If you have a good marketing budget and want to increase your sales exponentially online, Adwords is your best friend.

 

[davidvidgen]

The purpose of any ecommerce website is to sell either services or products. The thread above mentions SEO and I cannot stress the importance of ensuring that which ever platform you choose, you are well informed about it's SEO capabilities. If it's open source, I would certainly recommend using Wordpress with WooCommerce and Yoast SEO plugin. WooCommerce is capable of handling services or products, whilst adding the Yoast SEO plugin will enable you to ensure that on-page seo ranking factors such as heading, page titles, meta descriptions, URL etc can all be manipulated to suit. Using Wordpress, you have at your disposal a world of plugins that make running a website very easy and cost effective. Websites such as Paypal, marksandspencerforbusiness.com and Vogue.com all use the Wordpress framework so it comes tried and tested.

If a hosted platform is preferred then I would recommend Bigcommerce. I have many clients using this platform, again primarily because it has been designed with SEO in mind. Whilst you do not own the site files, you will gain all the benefits of product updates, technical support, PCI compliance, product inventory management at no additional cost. One very nice touch is the abandoned cart saver where you can choose to send customised emails to shoppers to encourage them to complete the transaction.

Again from an SEO perspective, make sure that your products allow user generated reviews as this will add vital content to the individual products pages which are often associated with thin content.

I would however like to add that SEO should just be a part of your decision making process. You need to make sure that your ecommerce platform is mobile friendly and you personally check out the platform on your own mobile. Our stats show that nearly 80% of traffic to websites now comes from mobile and tablet devices, so whatever you do, make sure you fully understand your target audience and their preferred browsing device.

Another point to raise is to ensure that your platform allows you to build data lists and segment them accordingly. 96% of website visitors do not buy on their first visit, so you need to be able to create call to action and persuasive landing pages that seek to gather visitor data. Your platform needs to be able to segment this data, so you can send tailored and bespoke communications based on the UX.

Whilst Demos are useful, they often come with little support or you are too scared to ask. I would ask for a member of the support team to guide you personally through the software - that they you can ask them to show you specific features and functionality.

Feel free to message me if you have any questions.

 

[MOrvisGoresponse]

Have any of you considered a webchat option for your website? or order taking through telephone/customer support. The best e-commerse sites have a fantastic customer service and this is reported upon via social media, word of mouth, etc. A recent study by BT found that webchat services have seen a 25% increase in the last 12 months Feel free to message me if this sounds like a viable solution to you

 

[midnightblu]

Very good comperision Faevilangel. I think as a new comer to eCommerce, people should choose hosted solution because it's the easiest way to have an online store with acceptable function and reasonable price. Other 2 choices are a little bit complicated for lack-experience people.

Some hosted services I can suggest is Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Stormcart

 

[Getextra]

We have done a few recently with Wordpress and found the extensions to woocommerce very cool

 

[Mail Workshop]

I always recommend that if you are starting out in e-commerce, try something like Shopify or Wix to create an online store. Then further down the line, when your product range grows, then switch to something with much more functionality such as Magento or Seller Dynamics.

 

[Luke R]

I tend to go for Magento, WooCommerce as nice and flexible for SEO... will also work with Shopify if requested by client, as it's OK for SEO (has improved a great deal recently).

 

[designlobby]

In my opinion Magento is becoming (has already become?) the No. 1 option, especially for large scale ecommerce setups. But as tabish mentioned earlier, its a completely different setup to most other systems and development time and costs can be much higher as a result.

For SMBs, I find that Opencart or Woocommerce are totally fine for the majority of ecommerce sites. Much less development time required and both have good communities behind them.

 

[benjamin_c]

Personally I'm not a fan of hosted solutions, I appreciate that there are some good ones out there (I have used them my self) but when it comes to it, there's a lot of trust in that provider to always deliver your expectations and if anything does go wrong and you decide to part ways, you have to develop from scratch as their system is propriety to them.

I've also heard that some businesses have been burned when they have grown and hit certain limits and then been charged a fortune for additional disk space / bandwidth etc.

My personal favorite eCommerce platforms are Magento for big projects (Although in a production environment really does need space to breath, at least a VPS with 2GB ram & 2 V-CPUs - which is around £60pm from a respected provider) and beyond basic installation and theming things can become complicated very quickly and require tech specialists to make sure things run smoothly, there's a lot of quirks with Magento that can and do impact on a business. If you're a small business considering Magento as a viable solution you should (unless doing it all your self) factor in a cost of between £2k and £10k for initial design and build, and at least £2500 per year for hosting and general support and maintenance. Don't try and build a production Magento website your self unless you're comfortable with PHP / MySql and the command line interface!!


The other system I'm a big fan of and recommend to most is WooCommerce, I like Wordpress anyway, and WooCommerce extends a great content management system into a great eCommerce platform that is suitable for a very high proportion of businesses looking to sell online. It's a cost effective system to design, build and maintain. and is something that most good local web developers will be able to work with as most are experienced with Wordpress. Costs wise, you could get a functioning WooCommerce website set up from between £1k and £3k (this will be free if you are confident in following YouTube tutorials and fancy a go your self) and maintenance is likely to be extremely low cost, a basic cloud hosting package will suffice for all but the most popular woo commerce sites (My personal favorite is Vidahost - save 10% with this referral code VIDA452) and most basic updates/changes can be carried out by technically aware business owners.

 

[phamhphuc]

Magento Go is not supported any more. But magento 1.9 CE can be a good choice for self-host ecommerce solution now.

 

[Spring Pham]

Personally I love to use WordPress and WooCommerce for any online shop that I made. It's free and easy and now all the theme are customize for exactly the look you want. Just simple click and install the demo. Wayyyy more convenient than any other platform.

 

[JamiQ's]

We currently use Bluepark which i can not fault nor speak highly enough of! it is easy to use everything in one place and is constantly updated and if there is ever an issue you can ring them and speak to an actual PERSON!!

We are looking to move to magneto dueing to now needing more than one shop but want them all in one place. Will let you know how it goes.

 

[Ali-v-8]

Sorry if I missed a post on here mentioning it Faevilangel, but you mention only Three types of ecommerce solutions. However see companies like EKMPowershop offer "Rented eCommerce websites"
They do not fall into any of the categories yet still provide a viable startup solution - Wouldn't you agree? (by agree I don't mean with the company, I refer to the type of solution offered)

What are the types of ecommerce solutions

There are 3 main types of ecommerce solutions available, Hosted, Open source / pre-built and Custom, all offer their own advantages over each other, and below is my run down of these.

 

[Faevilangel]

Sorry if I missed a post on here mentioning it Faevilangel, but you mention only Three types of ecommerce solutions. However see companies like EKMPowershop offer "Rented eCommerce websites"
They do not fall into any of the categories yet still provide a viable startup solution - Wouldn't you agree? (by agree I don't mean with the company, I refer to the type of solution offered)

EKM would come under hosted (aka rented), they provide all the tools and you pay them to manage the store.

 

[Ali-v-8]

Ok
We have template that you can buy and are hosted on a server using a CMS like say opencart which is one solution. (you can find anyone to help with these)
We have a custom build buy a website company - more bespoke usually cost more but have more scope (disadvantage every change require specialist help)
We have a ecommerce solution set to a template created by a company who manage the hosting and technical side of it (all you do is add.sell and market the product) (all tech support and changes are done in house)

What about squeeze (funnel) pages?

EKM would come under hosted (aka rented), they provide all the tools and you pay them to manage the store.

 

[nerochat]

My opinion is that choosing e-commerce platform should be done according to the company size.
Open source solutions are great for developers, but they could be very dangerous from security perspective.

 

[Ella_Chow]

Very impressive, a lesson to learn as I'm the green hand~

 

[Johnjohnson]

Have worked on magento for quite sometime although not directly but with my team to develop a website for one of our clients. One of the major advantages i found with Magento is the SEO friendliness i offers while optimizing.

 

[jakir001]

Predetermined, but as I declare, it's rare that a preexisting solution can't be tailored with less work when compared with starting again.

 

[Simon Atcheson]

well said

 

[arunthomas203]

+1 for Magento. Very flexible opensouce application. Have tons of extensions, SEO friendly, comes with responsive theme now. Only problem with Magento is, magento is a heavy and needs good hosting for good performance.

 

[BusinessPlexus]

Always compare is my advice... there is so many different packages out there now that we just cant keep track of them. These companies are using complex words which in reality may be as simple as sql database, but it makes them sound like they are giving more. Ive made the mistake of signing up to some only to realize later there were better deals out there.

 

[rahul2927]

Nice Post. I would like to say that magento is leader in open source eCommerce software solution. it has rich functions and ease to manage for eStore owners. Also there is strong community support to new features to power your eStore.

 

[cloudxhosting]

I would say don't discount Opencart. It is very easy to use and modify without the huge learning curve required compared to Magento. Having said that, Magento has a lot more advanced feature. If you want to hit the ground running fast though, I would recommend Opencart.

Also the new version 2.x of Opencart has got lot of responsive themes.

 

[Kylelewis]

but this is a nice post, why would you leave that?

 

[Jay66]

Hi,
Hopefully I'm in the right place to ask for some help finding a suitable eccommerce solution. If I am not I apologize. I'm looking for an ecommerce solution that can import my eBay listings. I am from UK & not interested in EKMPowershops. I don't want to pay hundreds of pounds a month either & I need something similar to what I already have. I had spoken to a few small companies in 2013 who said they were working on eBay integration but I never heard back from them. I spoke to Sellr which is almost what I am looking for but they don't have any eBay product import/integration.

I'm not interested in big names like Magento or Shopify as they work out far too expensive. I have a 5000 strong inventory & all my items are one offs. I do not sell new stock. I sell collectibles. Any recommendations or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Jay

 

[Jay66]

serpyre

 

[Tejaswi Raghurama]

Wow, this thread is now a treasure of recommendations and first hand accounts of using eCommerce platforms and solutions. To help us look back and take stock of popular ratings, I went through all the replies in this thread and counted the number of unique responses suggesting each solution/eCommerce platform. So here goes:

Magento : 11
Wordpress with woocommerce : 08
Shopify : 08
Opencart : 04
Bigcommerce : 02

Pre build CMS : 02
Unamed other Open Source : 02
Custom : 02

CashFlows, Joomla CMS, CS-Cart, Wix : 01

I hope this summary helps us to shortlist some of the most popular apps with more than 2 mentions and recommendations.

 

[buildmeashop]

We looked at a number of ecommerce solutions for our family business selling hot tubs, chemicals, spares and accessories, abut 8 years ago when the whole online selling 'game' was pretty much in its infancy. We started using an open-source solution called Roman Cart but when our inventory exceeded 500 SKUs and over 1000 orders per month it just become a nightmare!

We had to move away from Roman Cart, so then looked at a bespoke solution from a number of web dev agencies who said for £10K or thereabouts, to 'trust them' with our problem and they would go away and come up with the best solution. No spec, no testing and no comeback if it all went wrong!

We then made the pretty massive leap of faith into starting to use Magento, when it was still owned by Iruben. LOTS of sleepless nights, screaming at the computer and customers complaining that our new shop didn't work properly in their browser. Now, 7 years later, we're on V1.9.1.0, fully responsive, no major issues and, more importantly, we own the data and feel in complete control of our shop and its functionality.

So now, we've started a new business called buildmeashop.com that gives merchants the capability to easily create their own online shop using our extensions, user guide, know-how and training.

 

[CWT2k1]

Wordpress is simply where it is at nowadays. I agree that a long time ago WP was mostly for blogs but sites like theme forest offer millions of perfect sites in all themes. Also WP has a ton of great commerce plugins. Also I have a feeling there is some favoritism from Google to WP. They are pushing it like crazy. Another benefit of WP is after proper install and setup, it's much easier to update for the average person than some of the other.

 

[Lynn Blake]

Which is the best for SEO? WooCommerce/Wordpress or Magento?

 

[yamaDan]

Great initial start to this post, with so many platforms and options it can take months of research and testing if an individual has no experience.
For those looking to start an ecommerce site I would recommend making a list of all your known requirements for functionality and marketing planning. Then get some professional advice on both, not just which platform, it will save you loads of time and give you a better chance of success, most web designers offer free advice.

 

[Alby10]

Interesting thread and useful. In reality it all depends on the individual requirements. As quite rightly pointed out, Wordpress has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years to now be a serious contender in terms of ecommerce. Although there are other more specific forms of ecommerce solutions which are designed for the novice.http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/members/faevilangel.52381/

 

[Vistatico]

Really informative and interesting article. Thank you for sharing.

 

[thuylove29]

Nice post! Thanks for sharing! I'm working for Magento development agency.

 

[darlen78]

Well speaking E-comerce sites, I have soon lot of sites ...but most that stand out are developed in joomalaa...

 

[LeeKnowles]

Having used Magento to custom design a website with no CSS or HTML experience, I have to say the ongoing support and the backend is easy to manage with little experience (in my opinion)

However after deciding to give shopify a try, For a simplistic website this has to be one of the easiest options around!

 

[webitetc.com]

I find WooCommerce to be getting popular and smarter each month. With easy to install themes from themeforest.net and hosting solutions from the likes of godaddy, tsohost, etc... startups don't have to spend a lot on eCommerce solutions these days.

Not a huge fan of shopify, 1and1, etc but then again Wordpress is the simplest and easiest out there.