Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello Business People,

I`m looking to start up and etail store as I`m sure many of you have done already.  I`m currently looking  at Prostores, Network Solutions, Yahoo Small Business, Godaddy and others.

For those of you have experience using these products or others for that matter, I`m hoping you can give me some insight or advice on choosing a good, flexible service.

Thanks in advance for you assistance.

What sort of product(s) do you intend to sell?

The reason it matters is that some of these kinds of places focus on particular products. For example, CafePress does mostly T-shirts.

The best, mot flexible service is the one you build yourself.

Otherwise, everything out of the box has its limitations. Most have to do with the design and the functionality ... making something easy to update and easy for a beginner often limits the design and the customization.

Essentially there are two catagories of ecommerce solutions, bundled and proprietary like yahoo and open source like osCommerce.

Bundled and proprietary - are ecommerce solutions that provide web hosting and a program to create an ecommerce store and maybe even payment processing as a package.

Open source - are programs (usually FREE) that provide the front and backend ecommerce functions (like the bundled programs), but are not tied to any hosting or other "account" set-ups.

There are pros and cons to each catagory.  Some find the bundled solution easier to get things set up and online.  The significant difference between the two is the limitations a bundled solution has ...with a bundled solution you (usually) can NOT move your etail store to another web host, you have to stay with yahoo and there are some design limits. While with oscommerce, Zen Cart, or Xcart you can move your etail store to another web host.

So, for the long term I would recommend using an open source ecommerce solution rather than a bundles/proprietary solution.. it gives you more flexibility and control.

~Roland

 

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Web Design | Best Beef Jerky | ecommerce articles | Follow vwebworld on Twitter

Thanks for everone`s input.  Roland, thanks for pointing out the differnces between packages.  This gives me a list of pros and cons to sort out. 

Thanks again.

- Terence

Also, bundled etail solutions are usually more expensive than open source.. with open source YOU can select the web host etc.

~Roland

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Web Design | Best Beef Jerky | ecommerce articles | Follow vwebworld on Twitter

There are also bundled but non-free solutions as well.

Like this one I posted about, another called CartWeaver, and there`s something called AppleCart.
These are nice because you can put them anywhere ... but they also come with customer service!

Did I here someone mention Apple Cart?

Here is a link to it and check out the new features!

product page: http://www.spads.com/applecartdb.html

Demo: http://www.spads.net/acart/

I hope this helps!

You have definitely given me something to think about.  I have downloaded Zen Cart to play with and plan to look at osCommerce, Cart Weaver and Applecart as well.  I`m guessing I`ll need to get a merchant account once I`ve decided on which cart application to use.  Are there any recommendations for selecting a merchant?  What should I look out for?

Thanks,

There`s a poster on here who seems to be pretty good with the merchant stuff. omumpas I think? Something like that ... someone help me out here?

I`m pretty sure he has a listing in the marketplace. One of my clients has an account through him.