New ecommerce website

[-Chris-]

If you were looking to start a brand new eCommerce website on a fairly small budget of about £50pm and you already had the hosting sorted, plus you wanted the website, including the cart to be customisable and for a complete sales funnel as well, what platform / app would you choose please?

 

[Mr D]

Amazon.

Presumably you aren't looking at spending much on getting the website noticed among the hundreds of millions of other sites out there.

 

[-Chris-]

The SEO part is already taken care of. For the minute just need some helpful person to give their answer to the first post.

 

[d3lvedesign]

First off, by the sounds of your post it doesn't look like you're taking eCommerce seriously. To get the most out of eCommerce you'll need a well designed website, and a proven eCommerce platform like WooCommerce, Magento 2, or Shopify. Don't think of an eCommerce solution as "a website with a cart and sales funnel" it doesn't work that way. (I won't mention online marketing, Google AdWords etc, that's another can of worms).

An eCommerce solution requires serious thought and proper planning. Depending on the product, you might find yourself out-gunned by the competition who have already established themselves on the web. In this case get yourself on to Ebay and/or Amazon.

 

[WebshopMechanic]

I doubt you'd get anything for that unless you can get someone on People Per Hour or Upwork to create a Wordpress site with Woocommerce on the cheap. You might be able to persuade them to break the cost down over a few months.

Cost-wise:

• Wordpress is free
• Woocommerce is free
• Build - Some guy on PPH is saying he will build a site for £115 - See: https://www.peopleperhour.com/woocommerce-hourlies?sort=relevant&keyword=woocommerce
• Sales Funnel - To get any type of sales funnel you will need to invest a little. Active Campaign is my favourite. It's $17 a month for 1,000 contacts and let's you set up sales funnels with triggers. See: https://activecampaign.com

Word of warning. I'm not saying these developers on PPH are bad but you sometimes get what you pay for. But, there may be a hidden gem out there.

Good luck.

Matt

 

[fisicx]

If you were looking to start a brand new eCommerce website on a fairly small budget of about £50pm and you already had the hosting sorted, plus you wanted the website, including the cart to be customisable and for a complete sales funnel as well, what platform / app would you choose please?

Is this a self build or something you would get someone to build for you?

If the former I'd use WordPress and not bother paying the £50pm

If the latter I wouldn't know which one was the most suitable - that's what I pay a developer to sort for me.

 

[TotalWebSolutions]

WordPress with WooCommerce, or OpenCart - if you are building yourself.

 

[ukbf0001]

ecwid - It is cloud based (amazon EC2 cloud). If you want to use a product such as Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, Prestashop et al then you have the job of updating the patches, security fixes, backups etc (or you have to pay someone to do it for you) You also have the limitation of that your products are only in one place - on your domain.

What if you had a solution where you could place your shop / products anywhere you wanted ? or even better - embed your shop directly into FaceBook, FaceBook users wouldnt even have to leave their FaceBook session they buy from within FB itself, it's the #1 FB ecommerce app apparently. All updates are taken care of, same goes for security / bug fixes. You control the products / options etc in place place and the updates are immediately seen wherever you have copy/pasted the 5 lines of html to make your sure shop appear.

Over the years I have used Magento (bloatware), Prestashop (limited), WooCommerce (limited to wordpress only) and countless others.

You can setup ecwid in 5 minutes and get it on to your facebook page soon after. obviously you need to have all your product info, images, options ready. It's free for 10 products and then works out to be about£10 per month - you dont have to worry about anything else - other than marketing etc - and you can use Geo targeted FB adverts for that to get to exactly the people you want.

 

[Small Business Ltd]

Opencart is good for many shop products, but may require more work than you want to put into it. Opencart is Open Source and you can either install the free theme or look at buying a custom theme with a years support. Open cart is good for big shops in my opinion.

A Wordpress with a WooCommerce solution are nice and easy to manage.

If you look at Wordpress, consider buying a custom Theme that comes with some free easy to use plugins where the theme and plugins are updated and you get free support for a year. Search online for: Wordpress Theme Shop Slider Visual Composer WooCommerce to give you an idea of sites providing Themes with some good free plugins to make your life easier with developing the site. If you see a site providing these templates / themes, look at how old the Theme is and how often it gets updated.

Wordpress and Opencart are free. Your total costs to purchase a custom Theme (Open Cart or Wordpress) should be around £50 to £70 (One off payment), then items called Plugins that are provided with the Theme will be updated by the site you purchased the theme from.

Once you have the Theme, your only costs should be with your website hosting provider.

Remember also to understand and add a GDPR statement to your site and Cookie information statement. Wordpress offer free plugins for these as well. Be careful of Copy-write infringement with images you may use. In case you did not known, your site should also be HTTPS and not HTTP. Most re-sellers offer HTTPS certificates free of charge nowadays.

All the best......

 

[-Chris-]

Thank you very much to all that have chipped in with helpful ideas, especially Bluenun and SBL.

I'm also looking for a complete sales funnel, from start to finish, with cart abandonment email, exit popup, automated emails, squeeze page, etc. Does anyone here have any experience with platforms / apps to take care of the whole process?

 

[billybob99]

Thank you very much to all that have chipped in with helpful ideas, especially Bluenun and SBL.

I'm also looking for a complete sales funnel, from start to finish, with cart abandonment email, exit popup, automated emails, squeeze page, etc. Does anyone here have any experience with platforms / apps to take care of the whole process?

The basic $29 Shopify plan has abandoned cart recovery and the funnel is pretty slick, why wouldn't you just use that and get it moving.

 

[-Chris-]

Thanks, but not wanting to go the shopify route and am in no rush.

 

[ukbf0001]

Thank you very much to all that have chipped in with helpful ideas, especially Bluenun and SBL.

I'm also looking for a complete sales funnel, from start to finish, with cart abandonment email, exit popup, automated emails, squeeze page, etc. Does anyone here have any experience with platforms / apps to take care of the whole process?

ecwid has abandoned sales options - and yes that definitely works get a few sales back.. Good luck with your project

 

[MEAVO]

Wix is another option (if you don't have many SKUs). Even though they don't specialise on e-commerce like Shopify I do like the user friendliness of Wix, super easy to build a website.

 

[jazperson]

I would suggest Woocommerce or Shopify. Wordpress and Woocommerce plugin are both free but to get the full benefits of woocommerce, you have to purchase some of their addons. Their customer support is very responsive as well.

 

[fisicx]

Wix is another option (if you don't have many SKUs). Even though they don't specialise on e-commerce like Shopify I do like the user friendliness of Wix, super easy to build a website.

No don't do this. Don't ever use Wix for anything.

 

[jazperson]

No don't do this. Don't ever use Wix for anything.

Is Wix really that bad? I haven't tried it yet. Their commercials/ads look nice though.

 

[Paul Norman]

Is Wix really that bad? I haven't tried it yet. Their commercials/ads look nice though.

Yes. Pretty much.

Its a hobbyist site.

But by the sounds of it, that might be what the OP is after.

When I redo our ecommerce sites, I will expect to pay around £10k. That will be slightly up on what I paid last time. That way I can start to make heavy demands on what I need the site to do.

 

[ukbf0001]

No don't do this. Don't ever use Wix for anything.

100% agreed. About 2 months ago I just helped a friend of a friend who had a wix site done for her by a "website designer" - what a load of bollox wix is. Only cater for .coms not .co.uk , as far as optimisation goes - it is all over the place (or at least her site was) page titles couldn't be changed, we had severe problems with their name servers, the support was cr@p beyond belief , and if you wanted an email address that was an extra £x per month. I wasted 7 hours of my life sorting a web site for her (which she happily paid me to do) - all because she had fallen for the BS of the wix advert. Make other mistakes - but dont make the mistake of using wix.

 

[antropy]

Is Wix really that bad? I haven't tried it yet. Their commercials/ads look nice though.

Heard nothing but bad things about Wix, avoid especially if you are going down the eCommerce route! Alex

 

[Birmingham Web Designer]

Hi Chris,

As you're not in a rush and not wanting to go down the shopify route, then I'd also recommend using WordPress and WooCommerce. Once set-up it is free to run, minus advertising & hosting costs, and you can easily integrate other apps and services. You will also have full control over your on-page SEO, site security, etc and it's a very solid platform to grow your business on.

There is also a WooCommerce app for Android and there is a beta version out on iOS, so you can manage your shop on the go.

The only down side to this route is that some extensions that add advanced functionality are not all free. But in most cases, the time saved in automating tasks outweighs the cost to buy the extension.

I'd recommend you plan ahead, think what you'd like your store to do in the future i.e. connect to your POS, accountancy software, take bookings, etc and you'll easily be able to work out costs to add this to your WordPress website. Also don't skip on getting decent website hosting as eCommerce systems need to run quickly or you'll lose sales.

 

[Alan]

WordPress and WooCommerce would be my suggestion too, has all the features you need.

 

[ukbf0001]

I looked at and dismissed woocommerce a long time ago. Woo is fine (if not a little messy) if you just want your shop in one place. If you want your shop to be available on one than one website and also directly from within facebook - then ecwid is your only option.
Here is an example using ecwid

You can achieve something similar with xcart - but it depends on how techy you want to get

 

[Birmingham Web Designer]

Chris said he didn't want to go down the Shopify route and as Ecwid is similar, I guess it's maybe not what he's after. But based on his budget, if that includes website development costs then I totally agree, and Ecwid or Shopify are his best options.

Ecwid is not his only option to integrate his shop with FaceBook, and you have to be on a paid plan to get this feature. WooCommerce can do this too, for free.

 

[ukbf0001]

Hi Birmingham Web Designer - you dont have to be on the ecwid £12 a month paid plan to get your shop directly into Facebook - you can do it yourself - like I did with Nina's shop last week. nina is on the free plan option with ecwid.
Last time I checked - shopify charged more and offered less than ecwid (not a great business model). xcart has a similar option to ecwid - but the overall functionality of xcart is vast - but you pay for those modules. Nina is on the free ecwid plan, has a free facebook shop builtin to her facebook page, and now has the option to put her shop into any other domain etc.
shopify is $29 a month or $350 a year - and I believe and you have to use their shared hosting - well you did the last time I checked.

I had an enquiry yesterday from someone who wanted to use shopify - so I guess I'll be finding out soon enough

 

[Cheap Host]

I don't think Wix would be a great option as I dont think it has enough flexibility. If just starting out then I would recommend WordPress + WooCommerce

 

[LucyTex]

With a limited budget of £50 you can just install WordPress for free on your hosting and then install the free WooCommerce plugin. The free StoreFront theme is a great lightweight theme to get started.