ekmpowershop.co.uk provide monthly billing of £19.99+VAT with a setup fee of £49.54+VAT (a total of £289.42+VAT per annum).
easywebstore.co.uk provide monthly billing of £19.99+VAT with a setup fee of £29.99+VAT (a total of £269.87+VAT per annum).
Setup usually means just installation, setting up hosting and the shop system on their webservers, you then have to customise the site yourself to get it looking like the shop you want, and upload your products.
Both companies also provide a list of existing customer sites. Additionally both of these companies provide an online demo of the store admin, so you can get some idea whether their systems are flexible enough for the type of shop and look you require (although this is not a complete try before you buy setup).
I know about these 2 companies because their particular market of providing advanced hosted online shops for non-technical clients is the market my company is entering into with our
www.awebapart.com sitebuilder service (our service is different in many ways, including the fact that the online shop section of our sitebuilder is based on our own more professional, friendlier, customisable version of osCommerce).
Rather than providing another big-company face-less automated experience for clients wanting an online shop, we want to provide a more personable service which involves talking with potential clients first (is our service right for them?), discussing other things like branding and selection of a good domain name if necessary, selecting an appropriate design and colour scheme, and setting up and customising a shop as part of a free, try before you buy period. We see this as important pre-sales consultancy necessary for a client making an important decision like this. Clients might not understand issues like web marketing, names, SEO, branding, and design, we feel it is important to give them a helping hand.
Our pricing is £250+VAT per annum including hosting, but we only start charging this after a try-before-you-buy period where you can see your shop actually working, and if you decide to leave after, say, 6 months, we refund you the other 6 months you have paid for (prorata). Since we are a smaller, more personable company we are also flexible on how this is paid. We usually send out an invoice for the year, but we could do it quarterly instead, or we could arrange for a monthly direct debit. If this service is of interest or if you have any further questions, please drop be an email, we currently have a few other clients who are in this try before you buy process.
