Setting up a webshop

[Kinky]

A mate of mine is in the process of setting up a webshop and has asked my advice on what software to use.

They would only be selling about 20 items or so; therefore I think a solution like OsCommerce, ZenCart, etc, might be a bit overkill (in the short-term at least).

Another feasible option would be to setup an eBay shop, or my preferred option of just creating standard HTML pages (1 per product), and adding the Google buy now and checkout and PayPal buttons to each product/page.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Whatever the solution; it would need to be simple to administer on a day-to-day basis; as they're non-technical (where a page of HTML code looks like gobbledygook to them).

Not fussed about costs, just as long as they're not extortionate. And for a start-up, the cheaper the better.

Any suggestions/tips gratefully received.

K

[JamieBeeston]

OsCommerce is free, simple, easy, plugs in to payment gateways without too much hassle, and looks half decent.

It's on all the VDS Pro accounts

Would be my 'solution in a box' option.

[Kinky]

J - is it a bit overkill for circa 20 products?

K

[Plotloss]

If the inventory doesnt change that often and its a small product line then I reckon the Google Checkout buttons are a good solution.

Cheap transaction processing costs too, much better than PayPal.

If they're planning on using AdWords as well then its a very tidy solution.

[JamieBeeston]

Kinky said:

J - is it a bit overkill for circa 20 products?

K

It's a nothing to setup, expandable, and free...

I actually think it would be less work to go OsCommerce (click, install, click add new product, click add new product, etc, done) then to actualy get someone to code, test and secure a bespoke solution..

Obviously, each to their own

[jeevescat]

Check out these guys www.internetretailer.biz

We use them, highly recommend.

[transactor]

try cubecart , its a uk based company with superb support. Ive used it and osc and its much easier for the beginner with all the features and mods youd ever need

[rich1231]

Have pp and GC.

only about 5% of users will have GC accounts and the rest will have Paypal.

[The Moose]

hi there

we offer with all our hosting packages a handful of different ecommerce solutions. osCommerce, cube cart, agora and zen cart to name a few on the one click installs. We charge £23.50 a year.

tbh, i would recomend something like google checkout if you are only doing a few products and not changing. the reason being that if you use oscommerce (for example), it takes quite a bit of coding to get it looking different to all the other oscommerce sites out there. Although this does mean programming up a shopping cart etc takes longer.

if you are not too keen to program it all up etc, we can offer that as a service too.

anyway, if your interested - give me a shout

cheers

the moose

Edited by The Moose on Sunday 26th October 20:27

[timskipper]

cubecart is more UK friendly out of the box in my experience. I have one store running cubecart and a couple of others running oscommerce. I've had to make a lot of customisation to the oscommerce source code to make it work how I want, whereas I've hardly touched cubecart.

[dilbert]

Just out of interest does anyone have any idea about the other end of the spectrum with these off the shelf e-commerce solutions. It makes no actual difference to me, but I'm interested to know how many trades and hour these things can deal with before the system becomes compromised, and how easily you can intoduce load balancing and so on.

[rich1231]

dilbert said:

Just out of interest does anyone have any idea about the other end of the spectrum with these off the shelf e-commerce solutions. It makes no actual difference to me, but I'm interested to know how many trades and hour these things can deal with before the system becomes compromised, and how easily you can intoduce load balancing and so on.

CC will easily deal with 2 or 300 an hour

[anonymous-user]

rich1231 said:

Have pp and GC.

only about 5% of users will have GC accounts and the rest will have Paypal.

You don't need an account with either but we offer both, most pay via Pay Pal. Google need to do a cart facility like Pay Pal, it will kick ass then!

[dilbert]

rich1231 said:

dilbert said:

Just out of interest does anyone have any idea about the other end of the spectrum with these off the shelf e-commerce solutions. It makes no actual difference to me, but I'm interested to know how many trades and hour these things can deal with before the system becomes compromised, and how easily you can intoduce load balancing and so on.

CC will easily deal with 2 or 300 an hour

Oooo. Well I retract all my past venom then!


Is that from personal experience or second hand? The other thing I was getting at (but didn't explain), is that I'm interested in the integration into accounting. If CC produces acounts data, I can imagine that at those rates the database gets fat quite quickly. Does it do regular dumps or something?

I guess if it doesn't do accounting, much of the information can be "eliminated" but the load balancing aspect is interesting.

I suppose my real question should have been when do these solutions "run out". Perhaps that's what you meant by 2-300 and hour?

Either way, I suppose what I'm getting at is that you never hear too much about the "upper limit". I could happily accept that it's nearly as good as a bespoke system, or even that it's better than any normal mortal would need. It just seems unlikely that the upper limit is wide open given that a bespoke system could be scaled, whereas CC is a fixed release.

Edited by dilbert on Monday 27th October 16:13