E-commerce for SME's (Magento, x-cart etc.)?

Hello! I want to start online clothing-for-sale site and for this I have several requirements: stable server performance, not so high price, considerable amount of design templates, customer site support, magento, x-cart.

I have on my mind several options, but they are definitely unsuitable. Nexcess Magento is great, but their prices are high and it suits well to medium-sized businesses. A Small Orange and Bluehost have some decline with service quality, CPU throttling and server performance issues nowadays.

Could you please help me with this issue?

 

The first step to start a small business online is to have IT skills to build a website. If one doesn't have knowledge about IT then there is a website: http://www.netberg.com/ which makes free websites for small businesses within 5 minutes. Each small and micro business doesn't have enough power to fight on the internet. Netberg is developing an online searchable business network to help SMEs reach their customers and develop e-commerce websites without wasting their time, money and energy.

 

You may be able to get away with using a theme from Wordpress, especially if you don't have a lot of goods. You can always upgrade your site if business starts to take off.

 

I would look at Woocommerce with Wordpress as it's cost effective, simple to use and has tons of extensions.

 

For a start up site with a low volume of transaction, a Wordpress based ecommerce site should be fine. Else for a more robust platform, Magento is a good option.

 

From my experience, Magento requires lot of server resources and needs to be run on a VPS or a dedicated server. If you are going to have several hundred/thousands of products, than Magento may be a good option. Otherwise Woocommerce WP is great option and you can easily export your shopping cart (database) if you ever outgrow it.

 

You could try Stormcart (http://www.stormcart.in/). It's built especially for people who don't know about technology and computer so it's extremely easy to use and support team is very nice.

 

zencart is easay and great for small business

 

Like with anything in life, if you don't know how to do something pay somebody to do it for you. I prefer Magento because there are a ton of developers for it and it's pretty easy to find a team that will deliver a project on a reasonable budget. The other good thing about hiring a team is that they will most likely have developer licenses for pricey modules. This means you can have a bunch of extra functionality built into your site without having to fork out a bunch of cash for it.

The other great thing about Magento is that it can be turned into an app for both iOs and Android. I know because I payed the team over at mofluid.com to do just that. Don't know how they did it, but in a couple of days my store was up in both iTunes and the PlayStore. It didn't pop the charts as you might have imagined, but my customers think it's a neat idea. It's especially popular with the older crowd.

 

It sounds like what you are asking is not so much about the product, but hosting. Ie looking for a host who supports one of those shopping cart solutions.
While that is probably a quick and easier way to get started, depending on your aptitude for IT stuff, you might want to spend a little bit of time learning about each of the cheap and open source shopping cart/ecommerce platforms available. As you don't necessarily have to choose a host who specifically supports or advertises that platform. If you can learn the basics so that you understand what database and what front end languages and tools each platform uses, you can then look at lots of web hosting services, and you just need to ensure that they support the database type (ie mySQL) and language (ie php) that the ecommerce/shopping cart software you prefer use is built in.
While it can make things much easier and faster to get a plan at a hosting service where they have a nice little interface that you log into and it asks you a few questions then sets up everything nicely for you, there are some downsides to this, such as:

You don't have as much control, what you can and cannot do or customise is limited to the functionality of our hosts interface
Cost. Hosting which promises a nice easy web store setup, often costs more, which may be ok short term, but long term as you get to understand the ecommerce software more, you might not want to pay more

Also make sure you look into how easy or difficult it is to export and import data. For a few reasons:

Day to day maintenance, you don't want to do any more manual data entry than necessary
Future proofing if this is your first store, you may well later on realise that you need a very different hosting or ecommerce solution, and you want to ensure you can automate the relocation of your store data (and it can easily get really big) such as customers, products, suppliers, shipping etc to a different host or platform

Also think about some simple common customer purchase scenarios and the different product options you might want to offer, ie

Will you offer a discount on purchases of more than one... Maybe different discounts, depending on how many? Or buy one get one free.
What about shipping ? I found some stores just didnt seem to support a set price per item for shipping. They wanted to force me to calculate shipping by weight, or add percentages for extra of the same product. If you are a drop shipper for example, you may be charged the same shipping for each item, regardless of quantity and you need to add the same amount for shipping for each item in the same order
Or free shipping based on location, or offering multiple options with dependancies (ie maybe you want to offer 3 colors, black, red, white, and 3 sizes 8,10,12 but 8 and 12 are only made in color black so you need the size option to check what color is selected then only display the relevant sizes.
Try and think about some lf these sorts lf seemingly simple things, then test them out. Many of the shopping cart options, if you go to their official website, you will find that you. An log into a demo store from the website and play customer, thus ou get a chance to set up some test products based on your real life needs and make sure that ecommerce product will actually let you do things the way you need to.

Many of the hosting providers will offer you a free trial (be very cautious if the trial requires your credit card details, and you may find at the end of the 'trial' they start debiting your card until you 'cancel'. And of course the cancellation for some reason seems to be far more time consuming and long winded than signing up for the trial was!)

Finally don't forget to check out support for mobile devices, and try to test the options out on phones, iPAds, etc. Don't just take their word that it works on mobile devices, make sure it does, and make sure the admin from your end is straightforward. Also check if mobile support costs extra.

more and more ppl are doing most their online stuff on their phone or tablet now, so make sure you can easily get your store mobile device friendly... Or you lose that growing portion of potential customers.

 

Magento need high quality hosting, it's better to use server, but if you use zencart, it only need shared hosting, little cost, as my shop secrool.com, i think this system for small business is enough, but if you need built large e-commerce site, large traffic, you need to buy good server, shared hosting use cpanel is very easy to use, server is very complex, it need expert to built.

 

Hello,

Of course, if you want to create a good site with the dynamic pages including the perfect navigation, shopping cart, checkout page which can use Ajax technology, you should choose Magento platform. You can contact me, if you need any help.

 

From my past experience , Magento, Prestashop & OpenKart lot of server and needs to be run on a VPS or a dedicated server. If you’re going to have hundred/thousands of products, than PrestaShop is good option. Otherwise Magento is great option and you can easily export your shopping cart (database) if you ever outgrow it.

 

Go with Prestashop, it's a feature rich and open source shopping cart, Wordpress is a blogging system, not a shopping cart even with ecommerce plugin

 

First time you have to build a website and go through Blog i.e; blog spot or Wordpress. Need to create proper content related to SME business and it's portfolio throughout the world or respective region. Update product line as well as quality.

 

I personally suggest Magento Commerce , as it has alot of eCommerce and SME features and supported plugins.

 

I like magento, but it might be overkill for what you are trying to do. I would suggest using a smaller open source cart like woo commerce on wordpress to test your idea first and see if it takes off before looking into a larger more robust solution.

 

I'd let Wordpress do what it does best, blogging!

If you're after a full-fledged shop you could consider the likes of BigCommerce and Shopify, they have a few hundred nice templates to choose from.

Setting up the store is a breeze and the ongoing monthly fee takes care of the hosting issue.

Furthermore, they come with kickass analytics and add-ons/upgrades should you need to scale up at any point.

 

Wordpress and Opencart are good open source eCommerce platforms, easy to use and reasonable cost, these can provide various services with using some extensions or plugins. Magento is also a good option and widely used.

 

You can defiantly create a good website with stable server performance and cost-effective solution. but if you're not a technical person hire a Web Developer / agency So can focus on your main business marketing and branding.