Which ecommerce solution for our needs?

[amyd]

Hi,

We are currently with Visualsoft for our website and we're looking into moving to a less expensive ecommerce solution. The ongoing monthly fees are around £180 now (for our 2 websites) which we feel is too much for our business. We have an integration with amazon (6 countries) and eBay uk but we also need integration with fruugo, another niche website hosted elsewhere and all the international eBay sites. It's going to cost way too much to get them to integrate with the extra channels.

We need the new solution to be mobile friendly, Seo friendly and easy to use for none technical people. Ideally it will also have a purchase order feature too.

I've heard of magneto, big commerce, woo commerce and opencart but haven't looked into any yet. I'm just wondering if anyone can give us an idea of how much we'd be looking at paying for the design and build and on going monthly costs of any of these options before I spend any time looking at these in any in depth? Do any of these solutions fit our needs?

Many thanks

Amy

 

[bizzyrizzy]

Hi Amy

I would recommend magento which is free to download and install and some hosting providers even have a auto install inside the cpanel to auto install the latest version of magento.

I have 2 magento sites and wouldn't go with any other ecommerce solution and I know of a few people that have had issues with bigcommerce due to it not having flexibility of magento.

If you are looking at selling few products and don't expect a lot of sales I would say woocomerce but its not a ecommerce solution in my opinion and needs certain plugins to perform certain tasks that magento/bigcommerce can do right out the box.

Also you will want a designer to make or install you a theme thats responsive and works good across all mobile devices including tablets etc.

Regarding prices it all depends who you want to host the site with but you may be looking at £20pm upwards for decent hosting and speed. For the price of the design, coding and implementation I couldn't tell you could be from £500 up to £20,000 and even more it all depends who is doing it, the functionality and how you want it.

I currently have a site hosted with siteground paid up for the year £80 and is fast and support is always there with in 5 minutes no matter time or day.

Also I recently set up a ebay/amazon shop and used a plugin that ebay now own called M2E PRO and it syncs everything up between magento, ebay and amazon and deals with posting items to the different marketplaces and even makes invoices for magento when sold on different marketplaces. I would highly recommend using that for the ebay/amazon and an added bonus is its free.

Im pretty certain magento will have some sort of plugin as well to sync with fruugo.

I hope the above answered some of your questions..

 

[OldWelshGuy]

yep ther eis a connector for magento that does fruugo

 

[antropy]

The ongoing monthly fees are around £180 now (for our 2 websites) which we feel is too much for our business. We have an integration with amazon (6 countries) and eBay uk but we also need integration with fruugo, another niche website hosted elsewhere and all the international eBay sites. It's going to cost way too much to get them to integrate with the extra channels.

If £180/month is an issue then you won't want to go with Magento because it'll need specialist hosting, extensions are more expensive and development will be more expensive than other platforms because it's so much more complex than say OpenCart or Prestashop.

If you went with OpenCart, it includes OpenBayPro which is an extension to connect to eBay/Amazon/Etsy. It doesn't support any others at the moment so you'd need whatever company you go with to integrate with any additional channels and that might not be cheap.

Here's an idea of the pricing for OpenBay Pro:
https://www.openbaypro.com/plans.php

 

[EcommerceTools]

Hey Amy,

I personally wouldn't recommend Magento, the Enterprise edition is only really suited to large operations and the Community edition is clunky and time consuming to set up if you aren't technically minded. I've also found it quite hard to scale down for small business. Also MagentoGo, their competitor to Shopify, really can't compete with Shopify.

I'm sure people will have other opinions but this is just what I have found.

If you are not technically inclined and just want a streamlined solution I would highly recommend Shopify. It's very user friendly and has a great support network. Woocommerce is a great free solution, that has recently surpassed Magento on Top Million Sites and according to DataNyze has the largest share in the eCommerce market - there must be a reason for this is what I say...

PM me if you need any other questions answered, happy to help

 

[cloudxhosting]

It depends on the size of your product catalogue really but I would agree with most people on here, unless you need alot of speciality requirements and designs, stay away from Magento. It is just too big for a new site. If you have the money to burn though go ahead.

I would recommend you look at Opencart. It is easy to use and modify and you will spend a lot less of getting the site designed and implement because of that. It also has quite a lot of modules and you can easily by good responsive template around the internet that you can get a developer to customise easily.

 

[Alan]

dea of how much we'd be looking at paying for the design and build

That really is a 'how long is a piece of string' question. You'll find entry level install a theme (no design as such and get what comes in the box) from 'commodity suppliers' from as low as £500 through to top end bespoke design and custom features to £20k plus.

 

[adamo]

If you want a platform that can grow with your business, Magento Community (free version) will do the job. It's SEO-friendly as standard and has a lot of plugins if you need integrations, along with a large developer community if you ever need help.

Other platforms such as OpenCart aren't so SEO-friendly as standard (from personal experience), and simply can't scale as well as Magento, so you won't find any larger companies using it - only smaller companies that are looking for a quick way to have an eCommerce store. On the other hand, many of the major retailers are using Magento.

 

[PuneetJvw]

I use wordpress woocommerce and am quite happy with it.

It really depends on what you are selling and what all features you are looking for on your store.

 

[EcommerceTools]

That really is a 'how long is a piece of string' question. You'll find entry level install a theme (no design as such and get what comes in the box) from 'commodity suppliers' from as low as £500 through to top end bespoke design and custom features to £20k plus.

£500?! for a theme to install?

If you want to go the pre-made theme route, around $50 is the average price across most platforms and if you want someone else to install and upload all the dummy content probably another $25. This is where the advantage of Woocommerce comes in because if you need any further customisation it will be cheap and readily available

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Magento is owned fully by EBay so i would have thought with your multi ebay store it might offer the best long term solution

Never used it myself but as you want to make a choice for the long term future of your company and if you still see Ebay as the main means of making a profit then its probably the safest bet

wIth Ebay then its most likely they will integrate the other sites into it as a matter of prority if there is demand

 

[amyd]

Thanks guys, I'll check out magento, woocommerce and opencart.

 

[amac]

OpenCart for self-hosted and Shopify for hosted are currently my favorites.