Starter E-Commerce Site

[Ridolph]

I'm helping a friend set up a small e-commerce site. Unfortunately, I've only done large ones with huge budgets and such and separate departments for billing, so I never had to worry about the details, just the programming. :-)

So I'm looking to set him up with a cheap starter solution so he can get his feet wet. I'm looking for recommendations for some services and a little guidance about how to set up a newbie.

Here are the important parameters:

- Reliable host. Doesn't have to be the fastest or greatest for a small site. If necessary, we'll transfer to a better host later.

- 20-50 items. Decent e-commerce package, but nothing real complex. Complexity would come later if the site took off and then it won't be too much trouble to find a whole new package.

- Secure, obviously.

- Process Paypal transactions. Automatic or manual.

- Process Credit Card transactions. Automatic or manual. He doesn't have a merchant account and he doesn't want to go through a lot of hoops getting started. Is there an easy way to do this? I'm not sure about his credit. How much money would he probably need to put down to get started? Gross will probably be less than < $2000/mth to start, maybe going up to $5000/mth in a few months.

Thanks,

-Ridolph

[travmed]

I would suggest as a ecommerce package Oscommerce. Their package can be found at www.oscommerce.com and is free. Also it can handle a large amounts of products as well as it has many open source add-on's that can be helpful to one's site. It's very easy to start and maintain. It should also be fine for a growing business no matter what size.

I run a site that uses oscommerce that maintains around 1500 products. It took me about 10 minutes to get it up and running and to start adding products.

As far as CC processing maybe he should try propay.com to start and when he outgrows them then he could look into a merchant account of some sort.

Hope what I said helps. Good Luck!

[edited by: TallTroll at 3:48 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2003]

[Robino]

Yahoo! store maybe?

[normaldude]

Yahoo! store maybe?

Yeah, I agree. Yahoo Store is his best bet.

$40/month, and everything is taken care of.
[smallbusiness.yahoo.com...]

[Ridolph]

Does Yahoo take Paypal?

It might be overkill at this point. I was looking at Mal's package or something like a Miva site or ipowerweb for $7.95/mth that was mentioned in another thread.

[Ridolph]

oscommerce might be a good package. I would just need a PHP/mySQL host with SSL for that, correct? Does it use templates? For 20 items extra buttons on a regular HTML page might be easier.

Propay sounds interesting. Are they reliable? Their $1000 monthly limit seems kind of low though.

Thanks,

-Ridolph

[Big_Balou]

Ridolph,

I have to agree with travmed on this one. Oscommerce is a good option. It is an extremely powerful cart that is expandable from a couple of products to a couple of thousand products.

The fact that is free does not denote that it is any way inferior just that you may have to invest a little time into getting it set up the way you want it.

The biggest problems that most people faced when looking at it originally was that it was hard to customize the look unless uou were a programmer and the urls were not SE friendly. Now there are several contributions available which make these issues more non-issues. In addition there is a very active community of users and developers always helping to improve the product and can help out in a jam.

As far as payment gateways there are modules for most gateway providers and paypal processing is included in the stock install.

If you do a site search, at the top of this page, on Oscommerce or any of the other solutions you're thinking about you'll probably find a lot of information good and bad about each by people who are using the solution or have tried it.

Good Luck

***Newer members it is usually a good idea to read the forum rules prior to posting***

<added> Yes Ridolph you do need hosting that offers PHP/MYSQL for Oscommerce . Reasonable hosting can be found on Linux servers for anywhere from $3.95 - $16.95 monthly easily. Most host offering Linux servers are going to have PHP/MYSQL as part of the package and some even offer a pre-installed version of Oscommerce as part of that package. The majority of host that I have seen also have a shared SSL Cert available for your use.

There are contributions available that let you use templates but the stock install does not.</added>

[shadorunr]

I suggest [instantestore.com;...] it's inexpensive, easy-to-setup and easy-to-use. They also have a number of options available for payment services.

One thing that you might want to note: They are based in Malaysia, so there might be a little lag in response to queries.

And that's my 2¢ worth.

[SimonAllen]

You could look at small/starter trader merchant accounts with someone like WorldPay. There are advantages with this in having live authorisation and card verification which cuts down on getting caught out with fraud and chargebacks. From the developers point of view these are minimal issues but once your webshop is up and running it can become a big and very expensive issue if it hasn't been considered. Worldpay integrates with just about every shopbuilder software and cart. They also handle online transactions for large and small organisations from Nike and Sony down to tiny webshops.
oscommerce is a good bet but if your client wants to manage the webshop content themselves but don't have web building skills there are a load of more suitable low cost systems.
Shopfitter.com is free software with a low risk, pay as you sell charging model with free support or the Australian system shopfactory is only a couple of hundred Dollars for the basic version.

[Essex_boy]

If im buying Shopfactory is my Fav if its free then OSCommerce Cant be beat full stop.

However I tend to write my own and use Mals ecom cart as an add on.

Boy do I love it. If Mal was a women Id marry her.

[Ridolph]

Thanks for all of the info so far! It's really helping.

Instantestore is $50/mth. Wouldn't Yahoo at $40/mth be a better buy? I'm not comfortable with Malaysia-based hosting either. Does Yahoo take Paypal (or is this a stupid question)? They seem to be promoting their own service.

oscommerce sounds really interesting. The smallest store I've done was with AbleCommerce a few years ago, and it sounds like if I had to do it again oscommerce would beat it. Does anyone out there use Able?

How about one of those basic sites that use Miva?

Given the limited amount of business that he expects for the first six months, and the lack of need for anything complicated like inventory, I'm leaning towards an HTML site with links to Mal's, and offline processing with Paypal and maybe Propay for cards. Does anyone have anything bad to say about Mal's? Any example stores that use it?

Thanks

[johnroger]

digiSHOP works well. They have Paypal as a payment option.