Approaching development of e-commerce site

Hey all,

I'm interested in starting an e-commerce site and was considering developing the online shop using a hosted platform (shopify.com). But now I'm thinking maybe I should setup a self-hosted wordpress site using an e-commerce theme/plugin to test my business idea which will save me the $30/month or so fee for using Shopify while I test if my business idea is viable.

Anyone have experience/thoughts on the WooCommerce WP plugin? Also, should I try an all inclusive e-commerce theme or will I need a combination of an e-comm theme and plugin? Please point me in the right direction!

Thanks in advance.

 

I actually made an online store with moonfruit. It was very nice and easy. I would recommend you to try that before you purchase any other web makers. I believe they have a free trial also if i'm not mistaken

 

It all depends on how many products are there in your catalog. Wordpress is meant to be a blogging platform, so it will not scale much, beyond a certain point.

If in case you have many products, then going for a fully featured Ecommerce platform like Magento, Prestashop, Opencart or Oscommerce is recommended. All of the mentioned Ecommerce platforms are open source and is well supported, through forums etc.

But if you have a smallish product list, then off course you can go with WooCommerce, heard very good things about it. To be frank I do not know much about the WooCommerce themes.

 

WooCommerce is fantastic. At this point its one of the most recommended solutions for store owners on tight budgets and who like WordPress as a whole.

I would highly recommend it. On average we see about 10-15 stores a week moving to WooCommerce.

 

woo commerce or marketpress with wordpress can certainly work well. I do everything with magento but that has a bit of a learning curve. It is however a full blown enterprise level solution for free.

N.

 

Hi,

I would suggest you can think for magento community edition. It has lots of feature in it. and its free. Lots of readymade plugins available to work on it.

 

In my opinion.. Open Cart is the best... It supports more than 500 Payment gateways.. Its pretty User friendly.. and also has an integrated Mail shooter & an affiliate program....

 

You can try also bonanzago.com store builder based on Prestashop. There is 30 days free trial

 

We are all for folks being able to market their stuff around here but at least make an effort. Or hire a marketing guy. Spamming threads is not SEO. At least bother to say hi before you start dropping links to your stuff.

Nigel

 

Well, I too have good experience with moonfruit, I have tried and ya they do have free trial version.

 

I would agree with Harshal shah, magento is maybe good place to start. It's free of charge and there are a lot of features and modules which can help. Maybe you can install it on your local PC and play around a bit, before you purchase some other web shop.

 

We offer a 100% free ecommerce site with most of the features of shopify. If you want more features our paid accounts are still more than 50% cheaper than shopify. As we're in beta, we're giving new users 50% off of premium plans for a limited time. You can use the code "FORMBETA" (without the quotes) for the discount on our premium accounts. Check us out at http://sellerjoy.com

 

Thanks for sharing this information, I will definately want to purchase the web makers, for creating my website.

 

Hi Sellerjoy,

Does your platform cusutomzable, in terms design and code?