Recommendation for small online store

Recommendation for online store: small # of high class/dollar products

[martin_uboo]

Hi everyone,

I am fairly new to ecommerce & shopping cart programs. I have read several of the threads at this forum. Seems like the place to get options. This site is very informative & seems to be independent of commercial ties to products.

I have a new client that wants to sell a few (5 - 20) high class type items, each with a few options/sizes (2 - 5). Each item is fairly expensive ($200 - $2,000). Credit card processing & payment options is a must. I need to have a basic store site up & running in under 2 weeks.

The visual presentation of the products is very important (click to see larger picture & customizable look of pages, etc.).

He currently has a simple hosting package with Network Solutions that can be upgraded to the commercial packages. Network Solutions gives you Miva Merchant. I have read several older threads here about Miva being SEO unfriendly. SE friendly is important

This is a low volume product but is aimed at fairly high end clients.

I have looked at the Yahoo store package & it seems very good, but that would require changing hosting, canceling a new 1 year contract, etc.

Any opinions as to my best & most economical choices would be greatly appreciated.

I'm mainly a SEO person with reasonable HTML & "cut & paste" JavaScript skills. I did build a couple Shopfactory sites several years ago & found the product very difficult to customize.

Thanks in advance for your help!

martin

[JonR28]

I don't really like network solutions hosting... it seems kind of like the "brand name" kind of thing to do. IMO Walmart no-names are just as fine and 10% of Abercrombie and hosting is the same way. Don't know how much your contract is for but you might want to consider the Yahoo option still.

Accepting credit cards is difficult if you want to do it for real, and will never happen in two weeks. Your best bet is 3rd party processor if there is an immediate deadline but I would make sure that whatever shopping cart you choose has Authorize.net or similar support because you are going to want to get a merchant account eventually. A

As far as ease of use, paypal is probably the easiest. I have had horrible experiences with 2CO but prefer them over paypal due to the fact that you can customize your shopping cart appearance.

[GarryBoyd]

For a small amount of products, along with the search engine concerns, I would be inclined to build the site as a static site, rather than bothering with a full blown shopping cart. The only component you really need is a secure checkout, which can be provided by a number of third party solutions, such as Mals, worldpay etc etc.

Unless you have lots of products/lots of changes, shopping carts often add more complexity than they solve.

If you want to do it all on your own site, add a secure certificate, checkout and a merchant account. Small volume, process the cards manually.

[lawsonms]

Have you ever looked at x-cart.com. I like the package and it works well for SEO.

[golles]

I would go with static pages with a 'buy now' type button at the bottom of each product page linking through to a payment gateway/processing account.