eCommerce / New website needed

[S88MRG]

Dear all,

I run a domestic appliance business, that deals in sales, spares and repairs of domestic appliances (white goods) and also brown goods.

The majority of our work is contract work, mainly with estate agents, who require us to repair faulty domestic appliances and / or supply new appliances and we have tried to move away from the retail sector, as we have recently shut our showroom.

However, I feel with the online market ever growing, we need to invest more time and money into this sector.

I have a good friend, who runs a company in the website / catalogue etc field, and he has said that his colleagues highly recommend Venda as a ecommerce solution.

A bespoke design is out of the question, as we are looking at 6 grand or more (I hear) however, if we were to use Venda, we have the option of using a designer, simply for the custom feel / layout of the website at a much reduced price.

Does anyone have any experience with Venda? Or would recommend something different? I must be honest, I have almost made up my mind to use Venda, however am unsure if I should spend the money on a website designer to make the site look and feel more professional?

Any advice on this matter would be appreciated, as although I am reasonably competent with photoshop and most IT related things, I am far from an expert and feel the right move would be to use a system like Venda, however, pay for a design.

Many thanks,

Mike

 

[seoandy]

unless your approaching the worlds best solution EVER 6K is a little epic for a new online business such as your's which appears to be small scale (at least for now).

I've pm'd you some ideas and info - based on info you can find @ andykinsey.co.uk (my company site)

 

[drounding]

You could also consider Actinic to see if it fits your needs. Check their website and/or PM me if you would like to know more.

 

[sanjiv]

I have sent you a private message Mike.

 

Mike

Iv pm'd you my info.

We can build bespoke ecommerce sites for around 5k, We dont use templates so they are built from scratch. I can give you a more accurate quote if you can fill in the quote form on our website and we will contact you to tell you what we can do.

Hope this helps, Best of luck

Regards

Greg

 

[iboxsecurity]

Im sure the PM's have flooded in - I would recommend however if you are looking to do something on an affordable scale look at Magento, depending on what you are after, what scale, features etc we can build your site depending on your budget.

 

[marketimpact]

Dear all,

I run a domestic appliance business, that deals in sales, spares and repairs of domestic appliances (white goods) and also brown goods.

The majority of our work is contract work, mainly with estate agents, who require us to repair faulty domestic appliances and / or supply new appliances and we have tried to move away from the retail sector, as we have recently shut our showroom.

However, I feel with the online market ever growing, we need to invest more time and money into this sector.

I have a good friend, who runs a company in the website / catalogue etc field, and he has said that his colleagues highly recommend Venda as a ecommerce solution.

A bespoke design is out of the question, as we are looking at 6 grand or more (I hear) however, if we were to use Venda, we have the option of using a designer, simply for the custom feel / layout of the website at a much reduced price.

Does anyone have any experience with Venda? Or would recommend something different? I must be honest, I have almost made up my mind to use Venda, however am unsure if I should spend the money on a website designer to make the site look and feel more professional?

Any advice on this matter would be appreciated, as although I am reasonably competent with photoshop and most IT related things, I am far from an expert and feel the right move would be to use a system like Venda, however, pay for a design.

Many thanks,

Mike

I run a web design company called IBC Webtech. Bespoke design doesnt normally mean expensive. If you have a budget then this can be built into your site. If you are on a budget then you can use free opensource carts like zencart, prestashop etc. You can get people to build you a theme and these do not need to be expensive.

 

[florenceij]

Like already suggested have you checked out Magento. This can be developed to meet your needs and design customized. Have you got any special requirements or features for the appliance sales website.

 

[benjamin_c]

Magento is very good but takes a bit of getting used to and often professional help in setting it up, but if you're wanting a fully hosted and managed solution then take a look at www.tigercommerce.co.uk, they are very good and easy to use

 

[Vision2]

Post a spec or pm it if you want ot keep it private and you'll gauge some more responses.

Can't believe people are quoting prices without seeing an actual spec. Stupidity at it's best to be honest

 

[edmondscommerce]

yes £6k is defintely a big budget for an initial launch of an ecommerce site

as discussed elsehwere on this forum - an intial budget of around £1.5k will generally get you a decent fully functional ecommerce site based on Magento (or other platforms).

Of course you can spend even less, or a lot more - it often boils down to how much you are wanting/prepared/able to do yourself and if you are getting a custom design (as opposed to using an off the shelf theme) how much work there is in creating that custom design.

 

[Chris Fickling Design]

Total agreement with Joseph. The great thing about Magento is that with just a little tweaking the pre-installed 'design' can be changed and you can have a great looking, fully functional site for around £2k.

 

[edmondscommerce]

for the record I wouldn't use the default built in template any more, there are plenty of great templates out there that aren't so obviously magento

 

[S88MRG]

Does anyone do Venda based websites? I have been advised by a few people that this platform is the best solution, and have decided to go with it.

I would require a custom template to work with Venda, help setting up all aspects of the ecommerce solution and product input help / solutions?

We had a custom programme designed for us about 8 years ago, which contain a vast majority of our stock, however, there is no export function (very cheeky) and they want more money, does anyone have any idea how much it would cost to write an export feature?

My biggest concern is staying on top of new products and updating prices on a monthly basis, do you think this will be an issue? I also do not want to have to update my stockNET programme with new products / prices and then do the same to update the ecommerce products, so is there a way to tie this all together? Are there an other solutions to this programme?

I am open to suggestions, and quotes, however please only quote if you can use the Venda (now called Powa) solution, as I have decided to go for this.

Regards,

Mike

 

[Faevilangel]

From their site

All Design and Build is provided by Venda employees as part of our service. We are ultimately agnostic and leave the choice in the hands of our Merchant Partners to use our designers, their designers or a 3rd party agency

I would go looking for full on agencies that deal with Venda, as it's a huge system and not many freelancers on here would have used it before.

 

[cinddy]

Well in my point of view this all depends upon what kind of services you are looking for in your website.. It is very important thing because most of the web development companies find these kinds of things at priorities..

 

[theweeguy]

In your line of work, you'll need an integrated crm that manages both web form enquiries that are followed up offline, people that just called up and enquire as well as online purchases. Venda will only do ecommerce and you'll still be in the position of having lots of disconnected business tools costing you time and money.

Here's a case study of a client that has all their web business tools under the one roof.

http://www.platonik.co.uk/casestudy-explanar.html

 

[arjunthandi]

There are lots of great e-commerce systems that can be utilized each with their own advantages and disadvantages but firstly it's important to understand your requirements.

Arjun

Evucan Web Solutions

 

[InsideLancashireMagazine]

Your website will be important to your success - have you tried getting a grant towards your website with your local business enterprise centre? It's better to start with the best site you can afford.

 

[websitedesign]

magento with a custom design would be money well spent... hands down the best ecommerce CMS out there...

 

[geoffmwright]

S88MRG

Mike,

Firstly, you're swimming in a sea full of hungry fish here..;-)

Both myself (I run EMEA sales for Venda) and our friends in the Megento reseller community have a vested interest in steering your view.

Here are the facts..

Venda's is 10 years old and has over 100 large retailers on its platform and we have a consitent track record of helping our cutomers drive huge online succes, whereas the Magento Corporate edition has been around for about 8 months, I cant say how many Corporate customers they have, but I'm sure someone will pitch in here..

Like most of the platforms out there; from ATG, IBM, ourselves, Fresca, Snow Valley, Magento, etc, etc you'll find that we all talk about the same breadth of feature functionality set, the difference is that the established platforms have much deeper functionality, and ts this depth of functionality that allows you to seriously impact your online revenues positively e.g behavioural driven personalisation is going to help your customers find the products the want each and every time = more revenues for you.

Your choice of platform should be based on the following:

1. How much revenue do you expect to drive online (low = low end solution, high = Venda or our peers)
2. and therefore how much do you want to spend on the platform.
3. What charging model do you want to follow - revshare, up front fee, transactional, etc..
4. How much control do you want over the site (you get total control on Venda).
5. Do you want to pay for upgrades and new functionality (nope, not with us)
6. Do you want to get help from a community of 100 retailers who belong to a community forum and help eachother (you guessed it, yes we have it).
7. Do you want to succeed...!

Yes, we do charge £6K month plus a 15p transactional fee which is by far the lowest platform cost in our class, yes you can get other solutions cheaper but they're cheaper for a reason (I can already see the responses flying back ofter that statement)...;-)

The decision is not how much it will 'cost' you, it's how much will it 'make' you, and in that regard its Venda everytime..

Good luck and let me know if you want to speak to the team here..

Geoff

ps - To the Magento community - we are currently looking for partners to build their solutions on our platform, please drop me a line if you have aspirations for medium to large scale retailers.

Good luck guys.

Geoff Wright
Head of EMEA Sales Venda
07856 687 066

 

[S88MRG]

Geoff, I was actually thinking of the Venda for small business platform, now called Powa I believe? Do you design Powa sites? I am still having problems on how I am going to over come the product updating?

My current programme has to be updated manually, and if I were to choose Powa, this would also need to be updated manually each month, and prices change, and new models and released. The only solution I can think of, without obviously paying a large fee for a programme to be written, would be to have an export function written to our current programme, allowing us to export all the current models, with updated prices? However, I still see this being time consuming.

Have you got any other solutions? It may be, that if we can get a new system that will integrate well with Powa, that we change our offline system as well!

Mike