Online shop

[DollyBarton]

Has anyone set up a stand alone website with online shop? I'm going down this route and thought I'd need to hire a web developer but Shopify and similar )UK one I can't think of the name of right now) seem to make it doable myself. I'm pretty handy online just not a developer.

Any advise? Does the shop function need to sit in a site or can it also cover things like homepage, about us, etc? I see there is a monthly hosting fee and a transaction fee with Shopify, any other costs or pitfalls to be aware of?

Advice....sorry. I usually can spell!

I'd recommend Shopify for a simple diy ecommerce site, if you are reasonably computer savvy there is no need for a web developer at all, I set up a demo site in a couple of hours the other night.

You should be able to have the standard pages (and sometimes a blog) as well as the shop.

I'm a web dev and I've setup an ecommerce site (for family friend, for free -experience was needed- and she doesn't use it needs a bit of a kick up the bum I think) and work on one for large company (It's awful but I didn't set it up and am practically begging for it to be redone).
I always wince at the price of shopify but I suppose it's a good way of getting the ball rolling. I think of it like phone contracts, you could buy the phone out right then pay a small amount for the phone companies service or you could get the phone on a contract for a higher ammount per month. Slight difference is that with phones you can drop the monthly price down once you've paid off the phone but shopify (and similar) don't let you do that. Just something to consider

Thanks Older. The U.K. One I found is similar price but no transaction fees which I think is great for customers. The other thing about this method is that I will be able to update it and troubleshoot easily myself. If I had a pro develop a site for me for a bigger one off fee then I'd need them to fix things for me I guess at a further cost. I'll do a bit more research anyway!

Whats the UK one? I realised the other day that US based prices have gone up a bit because of the pound tanking.

Depends on what the problem is... personally if a bug was my fault and got passed testing, I'd just fix it without charging. New features or stuff you've broken, on the other hand are another story (at work they charge by the half day, if I say its going to take me 1-2hrs the client sometimes gets charged for half a day ).

There's also the Magento platform if you want to do it yourself for free. lots of tutorials online too for it. I just installed it on my website and then bought a premade theme from theme forest to make it look pretty and added a PayPal plugin for the payment bit. It's not quite as straightforward as shopify but no fees other than the website hosting and PayPal processing fees. I hosted my site with siteground as their customer service was better than go daddy.

Following Snafflebrain there's WooComerce for Wordpress, similar thing, user friendly/plenty of themes/free (loads of payment gateways to choose from, not all are free) but it might seem more scarey than shopify but possibly less than magento.

Form what I can remember, Magento was built for ecommerce and is better for bigger businesses/scaling. And WooComerce is better for smaller businesses/ less techie people.

But I've never used magento, just WooComerce (I'm mostly a Wordpress developer) but I think hiring magento dev's costs more.

Try ekmpowershop. Easy and professional

EMK is the UK outfit I came across. Have you used them yourself Pink? I guess my fear is that it would go tits up and I'd have to relate everything suddenly.