ecommerce help !!! platform & prices

[kris heaton]

Hi,
I run a small business as a glassblower making glassware paperweights etc, I mainly run the majority of my business through ebay which was ok at the start but now the expense kills any real profit, I do have a website neoartglass.com but its way out of date and it hardly takes any orders ! I need to get away from ebay and get a fresh looking website I've been messed around with so called web developers in the past and really want to do it right this time... So my question or questions are...

1, what is the right kind of ecommerce site for me ?
I have a small budget but on the other hand I spend £250 p/m on ebay fees and if I could generate these sales through a website rather than ebay this money would be freed up to fund the costs of running a proper site.
2, What's the right price ? At the moment I dont have a budget at all !!! but could do with an idea so I know what to aim for
3, What is the time scale ? How long does a ecommerce site take to put together (how many hours?)

Any help would be greatly received, I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to tech so layman's terms please (this is my first post on a forum that should say it all)

 

[finleydesign]

Hi Kris, if you can give me your contact details I would be happy to email over some prices, with Ecommerce pricing, it can be how long is a piece of string as there are so many variants

When you say small budget, do you have any ideas, £500, £1K, £5K ??

 

[kris heaton]

Hi thanks for your response I appreciate it's a vague question I've asked but really I need more information I will send you my details

 

[Tier1Logistics]

Speak to Mark at VTSDesign.co.uk. They are members on Here

 

[ryedale]

Thanks Philip, I'd be happy to have a chat and build up a specification with you so that you can get an idea of costs and what's involved in the build process

 

[Food From Cyprus]

From my experience it will be difficult to generate the same sales that you get on eBay via a new ecommerce website. My suggestion would be to sell on all available platforms (website, eBay, Amazon, etc.) rather than put all of your eggs in a new website basket.

 

[kris heaton]

Thank you for the advice, Im happy enough with ebay i suppose ! and would continue with it but would like to split the sales between a site and ebay not just ebay as I cant seem to get anywhere with ebay items sell to cheap (everyone wants a bargain) and fees kill anything left over

 

[webstore]

Hi Kris - At the top of this forum you will see two support sections for Magento & Opencart so that sort of suggests these are the most popular OpenSource (free) ecommerce solutions in this community with Opencart being the simplest to set-up & use and with Magento being the harder of the two - but equally Magento is so very feature rich with a huge community of developers offering extensions which can be found at www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect some of which will provide for integration with eBay & Google Shopping.

Being a big fan of Magento I would suggest you find somebody to build you a responsive site (so important these days given its reported Google are favouring responsive mobile friendly websites) using a template like say at http://www.templatemonster.com/category/holidays-gifts-flowers/?keywords=magento gifts (other theme suppliers are available).

Another thing to consider is in finding out if your product data & images are exportable from your current site. If not that could mean a lot of extra work if you have to re-enter everything manually. Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions - Ian

 

[Bill1954]

I know nothing about opencart but Magento is very powerful with a steep learning curve.
If you have less than 500 products I would recommend Wordpress, easy to use and there are folk on here who can set you up with a site for a couple of hundred pounds or so.

 

[kris heaton]

Thank to everyone for all the advice its been a big help, from what responses I've had and people I've spoken to since I think Wordpress is the way forward for me, Magento seems better for the more experienced and bigger stores than what I am aiming for at this moment (250 products)

 

[antropy]

I know nothing about opencart ... I would recommend Wordpress

Wordpress is a blog platform really. OpenCart has been designed for the ground up as an ecommerce platform ...

 

[antropy]

I do have a website neoartglass.com

Such beautiful products

I've been messed around with so called web developers in the past

It's still a totally unregulated industry which is bad but reviews/customer references are always worth checking.

1, what is the right kind of ecommerce site for me ?

Have you looked at Etsy?

I have a small budget but on the other hand I spend £250 p/m on ebay fees and if I could generate these sales through a website rather than ebay this money would be freed up to fund the costs of running a proper site

Unfortunately I think this is a very common misconception. "Build your own site, pay a one-off setup fee and then be free of eBay fees forever! Yay!" But people forget that fundamental thing in business called "marketing".

Don't underestimate the time and cost involved here. Unless you're pretty good at online marketing yourself (or are willing to learn), it's going to cost more than eBay fees.

2, What's the right price ? At the moment I dont have a budget at all !!! but could do with an idea so I know what to aim for

Probably £500 to £3k depending on the amount of time you need a designer to spend. I'm assuming you won't need anything particularly technically advanced that the open source platforms can't do out of the box.

3, What is the time scale ? How long does a ecommerce site take to put together (how many hours?)

2 weeks to 6 months, depending as above.

 

[Bill1954]

Wordpress is a blog platform really. OpenCart has been designed for the ground up as an ecommerce platform ...

Agreed, the point I'm trying to make is we have a Magento site with 20k+ products running on an expensive dedicated server and the modules are also expensive.
Our second site is Wordpress, has less than 500 products, runs on cheap shared hosting and percentage wise does as well as the main site, plugins are free or cheap. As the OP doesn't have a big budget, I thought I would just mention it.

 

[Olson]

I recommend opencard.
You can also sell through Etsy.

 

[stall]

From my experience it will be difficult to generate the same sales that you get on eBay via a new ecommerce website. My suggestion would be to sell on all available platforms (website, eBay, Amazon, etc.) rather than put all of your eggs in a new website basket.

Agree with this point, also look to see if you can squeeze more margin from somewhere to make eBay a more profitable channel.

 

[antropy]

Agreed, the point I'm trying to make is we have a Magento site with 20k+ products running on an expensive dedicated server and the modules are also expensive.
Our second site is Wordpress, has less than 500 products, runs on cheap shared hosting and percentage wise does as well as the main site, plugins are free or cheap. As the OP doesn't have a big budget, I thought I would just mention it.

Yep, agree re. Magento being big and expensive. If the OP is looking for something that runs well on shared hosting and is simple and easy, we'd usually recommend OpenCart over WordPress.

 

[greenbox]

I would also recommend the popular Wordpress E-commerce system (Woocommerce). It powers 30% of e-commerce websites. I've setup loads of Woocommerce sites for customers that are very happy with it.

Wordpress was originally a blog system, but over the past years has evolved into a website system, its versatile, very powerful and well supported.

 

[japancool]

Kris,

Your products are hand-made (I assume!) and look like excellent quality to me. Have you considered increasing your prices on ebay? Is there much competition? I imagine there will be cheap and cheerful mass-produce Chinese stuff but I would think you can make a point of the USPs of your products.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

A search on google comes up with 550,000 entries but this one seems to be the level you need to get good prices
https://www.caithnessglass.co.uk/paperweights/unlimited-editions/abstract.html

 

[serendipitybusiness]

I second wordpress with woocommerce, it is a powerful system with extensive plugin options so you have a fantastic chance of getting exactly what you need. Also there is a large selection of ready made templates available which can help you get close to what you want at the fraction of the cost of a custom development. As for cost no one can tell you cost without a actual brief and even then hours are difficult to estimate especially with an ecommerce website, it all depends on your specific needs. Judging by what you have said I would budget about 2K based on woocommerce and adapted template but that can change dramatically based on the direction you take and your actual requirements.

Hope this helps

 

[Prettycool]

Why not give Bluepark a call, they transfer site designs under £300 and from then on you can put your products on the site tick 3 boxes and it's also on Ebay, in other words 2 selling platforms with no real extra work! Good luck with the route you decide.