e-commerce questions - newbie

[krustyrj]

Hi everybody.

I’ll soon open a company that will sell some personalized stuff (most clothes) direct to customers via e-commerce website and to shops owners

I tried to understand a little more about e-commences platforms etc but I didn’t get it very well

I’m thinking on paying a web designer to create the layout and the website with a more professional appearance than those ready templates from e-commerce websites for £20/month.

After my website is ready it will need an e-commerce platform.

Please correct me if I’m wrong and sorry for my English.

What I want to know is after all this, I’ll be able to:
- add new products easily or will have to contact some support every time,
- have control of the stocks
- control payments (those already paid and those still waiting)
- Have an easy way to print the shipping’s labels for each buy
- Have a separated section of the website so the shops managers/owners can get a login and buy direct in the site with a different price and quantities (wholesale) after make a registration (this part is very important for my business cause I think 80% of my sells will be as wholesale)

All of this in the same program/platform and in a easy way so I don’t need to copy and paste information from one program to another.

I’m not asking the best site or platform (although you can suggest), I’m asking if all this is integrated.

I know that it is very confusing but appreciate any kind of help.
Again sorry for my English.

Cheers

 

[taz2822]

I think it's best that you get a very good e-commerce web company involved from the beginning. If your business relies on online only then don't take any chances. Avoid templates and D.I.Y. We have built many e-commerce sites and it can be a minefield if you don't get it right. All content manage sites should do what you want if it explained excactly what your requirements are and find the right company that can design and build from the ground up without using templates or skinning sites.

 

[krustyrj]

I think it's best that you get a very good e-commerce web company involved from the beginning. If your business relies on online only then don't take any chances. Avoid templates and D.I.Y. We have built many e-commerce sites and it can be a minefield if you don't get it right. All content manage sites should do what you want if it explained excactly what your requirements are and find the right company that can design and build from the ground up without using templates or skinning sites.

Hey Taz
Thanks for the answer
That’s is what I thought too but I still have some questions

If I get a e-commerce web company as you said, will I have to contact then every time that I need to change something in my site or add new products?

Does they give me all those features that I said (stock and payments control, easy way to get shipping labels, different access to shop owners to buy as wholesale without the public seen the price) in an easy interface?

Do you think that £1000-£1500 can do a website with this? (It’s a small number of products and pages)

Thanks again

 

[taz2822]

If I get a e-commerce web company as you said, will I have to contact then every time that I need to change something in my site or add new products?

If they build a CMS site ( content managed) which is what you need, then you will be able to add pages, change product, upload pixs, delete etc very easily - if they have built it correctly.


Does they give me all those features that I said (stock and payments control, easy way to get shipping labels, different access to shop owners to buy as wholesale without the public seen the price) in an easy interface?

That could be built into the spec. Seperate login areas for trade and wholesale prices etc no problem.

Do you think that £1000-£1500 can do a website with this? (It’s a small number of products and pages)

That is on the slim side tbh, I know a fair number of guys out there will take your money, then it all goes pear shaped....

If you want to pm me to go over excactly what you need I'll give you a more in-depth guide as to who or what questions who really need to be asking for this project. I may consider the project myself - or more possibly recommend someone I know who will do a good job or at least point you in the best direction.

 

[krustyrj]

If you want to pm me to go over excactly what you need I'll give you a more in-depth guide as to who or what questions who really need to be asking for this project. I may consider the project myself - or more possibly recommend someone I know who will do a good job or at least point you in the best direction.

My plan is just to next year so I’ll wait a little more and get more information.
How long does it takes to create a complete site with all theses features that I told and the e-commerce working perfectly?

Again thanks for the help

 

[matt.chatterley]

My plan is just to next year so I’ll wait a little more and get more information.
How long does it takes to create a complete site with all theses features that I told and the e-commerce working perfectly?

Again thanks for the help

The turn-around time can vary wildly - although I would say if you have a requirement for very fast turnaround, you need to let your eCommerce provider know as early as possible in the process.

From the above (your original post), it seems that our shopping cart would be suitable - if integrated into one of our bespoke designs. Just drop us a line if you have any questions you'd like answered!

 

[Silent Web Solutions]

You have two optons here:

1. to have a custom developed and designed eCommerce site built to match your exact requirements but your budget of £1,500 is no where near enough for this. We have custom developed many eCommerce Shopping Cart websites for clients and you are looking at a minimum of £5,000.

2. There are many ready built eCommerce solutions on the market today that can very easily be modified to include the functionality that you require as I have already done this in the past for other customers. For £1,500 you could then have a 100% unique design and all the functionality you require.

 

[Happy2Help]

Actinic Express
Amazon
Andale
Ashop
Balans
Brick
Build and Go
Channel Advisor
CRE Loaded
CS – Cart
Cube Cart V3
Cube Cart V4
Ebay
Ecommerce Templates
Edirectory
EKM Powershop
Epages
Eshopfitters
Ethical one stop shop
Firepages
Frooition
Glassraven
Google checkout
Internet retailer
Interspire
Jshop
Kynet
Magen to
OSC Max
osCommerce
Pace Retail
Pay Pal
PH New Media
Pixmania
Play Trade
Roman Cart
SellerMania
Sopify
SQL Store
Venga Cart
X-Cart
Zen Cart
Any Bespoke system
Print out your order details on Laser A4 Paper with a peel out address label. Use this document to pick, Invoice and despatch your order to the address which has been printed on the label.

S13 Integrated Labels is new for selling EBay Business users, known also as EBay printer version labels.
No additional software is required! You receive an order, required from "needs posting", press "view order details", then highlighted in blue "printer version" using S13 Integrated label paper the document is printed with the buyers address on a removable label, the remaining sheet has the order details, cost and is used as a receipt.
EBay selling manager pro uses S6 Integrated labels to print an address label and Invoice document on a single laser sheet, through all laser desktop printers.

 

[Wiggy]

Hi Krusty,

Your original post apologises for your English. [Unnecessary, English is fine] Do you by any chance speak Russian?

 

[quikshop]

Do you think that £1000-£1500 can do a website with this? (It’s a small number of products and pages)

That is on the slim side tbh, I know a fair number of guys out there will take your money, then it all goes pear shaped....

We've seen many newcomers to Ecommerce getting ripped off by web design businesses, often paying out £5000 or more for a shop that they never fully own and one that never delivers what they had hoped for.

If your product is unproven or you lack Ecommerce experience which you openly admit in your post then use a lower-cost and lower-risk solution.

You can have a perfectly good feature rich and easy to manage online shop created using free to use open source software or a hosted solution for less than £1000, and that includes a professional design for your shop.

There are several Ecommerce providers on this forum that could give you some fine examples of cost-effective shops, try posting a request for quotes in the Tenders part of this forum.

 

[EcoCleanHome]

My plan is just to next year so I'll wait a little more and get more information.
How long does it takes to create a complete site with all theses features that I told and the e-commerce working perfectly?

Yes, it's good to spend more time researching before jumping into solutions.
And finally you must consider marketing / search engine optimisation for your site after launch.

 

[strikingedge]

£1500 is a good budget for a custom designed template to be put on open source software or a hosted solution.

If you can't find anyone to do it for that, you just need to shop around.

For your money you should receive an absolutely beautiful design according to your specifications as well as full set-up and configuration of the service.

The main reason prices creep us is because the client doesn't know what they want at the outset, so the brief changes during the job.

You've already been given a long list of different software to check out.

My personal preferences - after a good 10 years of doing online retail - would be either Shopify or Zen Cart.

 

[applemaidcleaning]

Hi Krusty,

Your original post apologises for your English. [Unnecessary, English is fine] Do you by any chance speak Russian?

R robopo pyccknnrEbik, He Tak NiN?

sorry dont know how to around letters lol

 

[Wiggy]

R robopo pyccknnrEbik, He Tak NiN?

sorry dont know how to around letters lol

Oh, I don't speak Russian myself but my current sites are heavily customised on a 'Litecommerce' platform and Litecommerce is a Russian shopping cart. They also have an off-the-shelf package called X-Cart.
The only problems I had was getting them to understand some of my more obscure customisations but for a Russian speaker, it would be easy to get what the OP wants. . .

 

[applemaidcleaning]

Oh, I don't speak Russian myself but my current sites are heavily customised on a 'Litecommerce' platform and Litecommerce is a Russian shopping cart. They also have an off-the-shelf package called X-Cart.
The only problems I had was getting them to understand some of my more obscure customisations but for a Russian speaker, it would be easy to get what the OP wants. . .

very hard to learn, cool much business.

 

[realex_jonathan]

If you would like to talk about accepting payments and how to go about that end of things I'd be happy to help. just drop me a message

 

[AGSmiff]

I am going to be biased as usual and say Joomla + Virtuemart is an excellent way to get a professional ecommerce setup. Your budget of £1000 - £1500 in my opinion is more than adequate to have the kind of site you require commissioned.

I agree with Taz2822 on the topic of not using templates but... If you use Joomla you can again in my opinion use templates successfully as any quality Joomla template designed to work with the Virtuemart component will be hugely felxible and any functionality or theme you wish to incorporate into the site can be achieved very easily. For examples of some great ecommerce templates for joomla you should have a look at -

http://www.shape5.com/demo/shopper_frenzy ( for an example of a site using this template that I have created recently and modified to fit another shopping cart system see supercheapmedsonline.com, spammy name I know but it's not my site)

http://www.rockettheme.com/joomla-templates/mynxx

These can be customised easily to fit any branding or fucntionality you need.

Also as mentioned in previous posts you really do need an ecommerce system. And again I am very biased towards Joomla as it is highly flexible and very easy to use... If you can use Microsoft Word then you can learn how to update a Joomla website.Virtuemart is also very easy to use to manage customers, orders and products etc.

Search Engine Optimisation is relatively easy to implement into Virtuemart as well...

 

[phil0s0pher]

You need a decent e-commerce company on board from the get go. £20 a month for a template website is nooooooooo gonna work.

 

[Happy2Help]

Have an easy way to print the shipping's labels for each buy

You could try using Integrated labels, its a sheet of A4 laser paper with a peel out delivery label, lots of e-retails use them. this company has the largest stock size integrated labels witha next day UK delivery. http://www.cheap-integratedlabels.co.uk Hope this helps

 

[Vision2]

Have a look at Magento, from your spec above would fit quite well i think but you would need to run through it to work out if it fully matches.

bespoke stuff generally runs at £10k+, in addition to ongoings.

budget of about £1500 is about right for a opensource system like magento or whatever else.

Personally I do them for £1250 - £3000.

You should also consider the ongoing cost of any system you use, hosting for example (not cheapo crap hosting), SSL (secure certificates), ongoing work, changes / amendments / additions as well as a marketing budget to promote the site.

Magento is a good choice as it will split the wholesale from retail pricing via customer groups you can place people into, and this can be different depending on which usergroup they are placed in, so you can give further discounts to some companies than to others for example.

Your spec is lacking in detail through, so it's impossible to say with 100% accuracy, worth a look through.

 

[SIX1]

When you get something built/buy something, just check it has an API, almost all of them do - but if you want a truly integrated system you'll probably be needing this to integrate with a fulfilment partner like ourselves (other providers are available It's basically a way of removing cutting and pasting orders between systems by allowing different web-servers to speak to each other directly.

Integration with Adwords and Google Analytics would also be good features to look for.

James

 

[iworkfromhome]

I used ekm and still do, My website is now 18 months old and we are paged 1 raked with no help, i found it very affective for a medium size business And we didnt have the budget when starting out. We find it easy to use although of course a decent budget for seo does help. carmats2u is the site we have had for 18 months and we are just about to launch a new site using the same ekm system know that we know our way around it better, it is good for start up tho i have to say. Kind Regards

 

[ORDERED WEB]

I am going to be biased as usual and say Joomla + Virtuemart is an excellent way to get a professional ecommerce setup. Your budget of £1000 - £1500 in my opinion is more than adequate to have the kind of site you require commissioned.

I agree with Taz2822 on the topic of not using templates but... If you use Joomla you can again in my opinion use templates successfully as any quality Joomla template designed to work with the Virtuemart component will be hugely felxible and any functionality or theme you wish to incorporate into the site can be achieved very easily. For examples of some great ecommerce templates for joomla you should have a look at -

http://www.shape5.com/demo/shopper_frenzy ( for an example of a site using this template that I have created recently and modified to fit another shopping cart system see supercheapmedsonline.com, spammy name I know but it's not my site)

http://www.rockettheme.com/joomla-templates/mynxx

These can be customised easily to fit any branding or fucntionality you need.

Also as mentioned in previous posts you really do need an ecommerce system. And again I am very biased towards Joomla as it is highly flexible and very easy to use... If you can use Microsoft Word then you can learn how to update a Joomla website.Virtuemart is also very easy to use to manage customers, orders and products etc.

Search Engine Optimisation is relatively easy to implement into Virtuemart as well...

The fly in the ointment is that the OP is selling customised products, and VM deals with stuff like this appallingly / To really give a recommendation, we need to explore
- how is it customised
- what additional info, files etc.. needs to be added to an order
- how do the prices vary depending on the customisation parameters
- does the shipping change after the product is customised

 

[edmondscommerce]

For these requirements I would recommend Magento every time.

Out of the box it handles:

B2C and B2B pricing in same store (or as different stores if you wish)

And also handles customised products (eg custom printing, file uploads with purchase etc) as standard thanks to the "Custom Options" functionality.