E-commerce

[greedychops]

I wondered whether any of you use an e-commerce package on your website. Until now, I've got customers just to contact me if they want to buuy things as they are made to measure items, but I want to start selling some standard sizes and gift items, so customers have said they would like to be able to buy directly online.

Do any of you use pay pal's shopping basket which appears to be free (other than the usual pay pal commission), and other packages seem to be around £20 a month.

Just looking for any experiences really of why you chose a particular package, and whether you have been pleased with it?

Bump

Hi, there are loads of packages out there, some free, some cheap, some expensive and in general its a case of you get what you pay for. Depending on your budget you can also get a web design company to make you a full ecommerce site - advantage being that you get what you need plus the help to use it effectively. This is the route that I went, but then the ecommerce side was the main part of my business for the first two years til we opened the shop so it had to work well. Mr Site is pretty good for most things, and is quite flexible. Actinic is time consuming to set up and a bit fiddly for both you and your customers to use. Haven't had any experience of the new PayPal one - in the past you needed quite a lot of technical ability to set it up and get going. Hope that helps.

have a look at this forum
www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=59

Thanks to you both for that.

I wold normally go for a web designer to do it for me (if it was a reasonable price) but I have really good google lists with my current site which I like, so I really just to be able to slot the shop into the current site.

I will go on the business forums and see if someone can help.

Thanks

I'm about to do this and have been recommended to start with a PayPal Business account and then, if the business grows (fingers crossed!) try BigCommerce.

There is a really good book/magazine on sale at the moment called "How to Set Up An Online Business". I bought it at Sainsbury's (of all places to buy a business book!) it was in the magazine section and is brilliant. Well worth £7.99.

Here is a link for some info on it.

greedychops, what you need is a freelance SEO professional (basically IT experts who specialise in getting websites to the top of the search results pages) either to protect your current site, increase its performance, or sort out a new website so you get lots of visitors. they are like web designers, but more specialised (and expensve )

i've namechanged for this because i don't want it to be known that i'm self employed (SIL found my login name for MN and i don't want to get outed again - i sell a very specific category of children's items from my own online website) - i got my website redesigned and orders went downhill - took advice from my brother (who is a SEO himself, that's how i got started online, with his advice), he fixed it for me and a year later it's back up to where i was in 2009. so, if you are worried about getting a new website but losing your visitors, talk to someone you know who might have had experience in that field :)