Hello, I am wondering how I should go about starting my online store selling a range of beauty products. I have a limited knowledge on html, I have designed a simple website using dreamweaver, but my knowledge is really a newb. That being said, I am wondering if I would be better off having someone design my site, or should I try and design my own using something like Prestashop, Magenta, or something similar? I see there are free versions and paid versions of these, would I be better off with the payed version being a newb? Any push in the right direction or suggestions would be appreciated! ps, I would like the ability to use Visa or Mastercard to pay for items also...not sure if that is relevant or not, just threw it in there anyway. Thanks.
Zen cart and virtue mart (JOOMLA) are also viable options. Many hosting providers have ways to install shopping carts with a click of a button through your control panel and most of them have some free templates to get you up and running fast. If those templates don't work for you, I would definitely recommend having someone design and configure your site for you. Some of the carts have bigger learning curves than others. As for payment methods you can usually set which methods you accept in the administration.
I would say that you are way better off paying someone to design you a really awesome website, just make sure that you fine a great web designer
i made my own shop by learning reading on different forums, it takes a lot of time because its more difficult to design a webshop there is more elements and you can not just use a program like dreamveawer. Here a ½ year after i think i should have paid a designer cause it takes a lot of time to seo the site and no matter how you turn the things around it will be expensive to start a shop, if you want succes.
I think you should get a professional to design you a website.Or if you have enough time, learn about html and try and design one yourself.you never know you might make a good website.
Hi Friend, Thats a great idea starting an ecommerce business online, High revenue earning platform. I would like to suggest 3 things for ecommerce as my experience will help you. 1. If you are planning to buy a ecommerce script, then AJ Shopping Cart Software ,will be the right choice with plenty of user friendly facilities. 2. If you worry about hosting issue, you can get Zscart - SaaS Ecommerce solution with easy monthly payment option and free trial too. you can make your shop with in five minutes. 3. If you are looking for free source means, Zeuscart will be right choice. Highly downloaded open source script online. Good luck ...Choose one for successful ecommerce business.
Right now a friend and I are working on building an e-commerce site with joomla and virtuemart. However, it's taking longer than expected so maybe for the first time I would recommend hiring a professional (if you can afford it). Cheap places to find designers are elance and odesk.com. Of course there are more expensive places to look for designers.
I also suggest paying a professional to set up your web store. Most of the decent shopping cart systems are fairly complex and go way beyond basic HTML skills. I use these guys for all of my shopping carts: http:/www.ezosc.com they have solid software that is built off of osCommerce but has all 30-40 extra contributions already installed for SEO, payments, shipping, reports, etc.... so you can focus on running the store and getting more business!
Dear Darla, Here is my recommendations based on my own experiences (3 ecommerce websites in the last 12 years): Don't waste your time with osCommerce. It is unreliable, unpredictable, clunky, but it is customizable which is what most techies like about it. It is also not easy to work with it and not clean looking. The Magenta free version (COMMUNITY) is all you need - although it will take you about 1 week to set it up and feel comfortable with it. I recommend you do it youself so you don't have to rely on others who are going to charge you each time you want a small change. It is easier than you can imagine and i have set up a dozen of these for my friends. If you know basic html then you can do this - i really believe this. Once you got a shopping cart, you will need a payment processing system and for start i suggest you use paypal (although i really don't like them but i think it is smart for you start with them irrespective of how i personally feel about them). They change their policies and make you dance around just to get your money. But initially it is good for you to start and use them. Then you can consider a company like anaxstar.com or securetrans.com or similar payment processing service that charges about $40 a month for a good service, with security and SSL, and is all-inclusive so that you don't have do any of the techie work and you have your money deposited directly (and instantly) into your business bank account. For beauty products this is what i recommend. If you had any other specific questions, I would be happy to help. I have been where you are right now and made many mistakes (some costly) to learn how to do an ecommerce site. Hope this helps
I will suggest to hire Good Web Design company for making your website professional design and Custom Development. I do not believe in third party or ready made , There is lots of problem in this type of script, you have to limit with your feature,
you'd better learn some basic skills on html, then you can try zen cart, it's free, and its forum has many useful resources.
If you're new to hosting, domain names, online credit card processing then you can either take the time to learn that stuff (not hard, but very time consuming) or pay someone to do it for you. Have you tried posting the job description to Guru or Elance (freelancer) sites to see how much developers will charge to help you?
Using OS commerce cart to help you up in e-commerce. In webpages, it you fill troublesome in Dreamweaver. You may look for Microsoft front pages. It a nice software to design a website as well.
Now this is an incredibly helpful post. A few of the posts here were just like try this cart, and no explanation and that disappointed me. I don't know if those guys own or are affiliates for the carts they recommended or what, but one of them is a hosted e-commerce cart. Hosted e-commerce carts are terrible. It is always better and cheaper to use an open source cart if you are beginner because at least you will have full control of the site. I recommend Opencart because it's easy to learn. SEO isn't too hard to set-up and if you know how to do basic html and php you can definitely follow the instructions and set it up. Designing the site is a different beast though. You'll have to get your coding hands dirty so you might want to hire a decent web designer to do it. Just make sure they don't spend all their time on the home page like many designers do, as good designers focus on the entire site and not just making your homepage fancy and then only changing the color of everything else. Besides, if you use PPC you aren't going to be focusing on the home page design anyway. +repped Seeker
If you do choose to go for magento I would suggest a VPS server as it is very resource intensive. Personally, I prefer opencart quicker loading and easier to code for and edit to your specifications. It has all the features you need. Such as Guest checkout, shipping weight calculator, full sales & promotions support. Even if using a third party payment processor I would strongly suggest you invest in a SSL cert as many potential clients will be off put by having to put in the personal details through a non-secure connection.
There's a vast difference between hosted shopping carts and open source shopping carts, with hosted shopping carts everything associated with hosting the shopping cart is handle for you by the provider. You only have to worry about the template design, SSL and with payment provider that you're going to use for processing customers' payments if you don't already have a merchant account with your local bank otherwise you would utilize one of the many payment processors' services depending upon where (specific countries) your customers are coming from on the internet. With an open source platform (i.e. Magento, Prestashop, etc) you're responsible for everything, this includes making sure the software is properly installed on your server provider by your hosting provider, designing and installing the template for how you want your store front to look along with everything else associate with running an online store. If you lack programming experience than you would have to hire a website designer & backend programmer who has extensive with one of the open source platforms mentioned to set up your site how you want it to function and convert potential customers to making purchases from your online store. That's the main difference between hosted & open source carts. The other difference depends upon the complexity of the back end or administrative interference where you would input all the products you're going to be selling on your site plus any of preferences (i.e. Newsletter, Payment processor, etc). You have to decide what specific features you want for your store and than decide on which shopping cart best fulfill those specifications. You will find that you may start out with one shopping cart than later on down the line decide to switch to an entirely different shopping cart because the formal shopping cart either doesn't fulfill all of your needs or you wish to move on to a more customize CMS for your needs as your business expands. Its all up too you and what you eventually decide.
I will suggest you to use oscommerce or prestashop because they are easy to configure and easy to administrate And you should try to take payments by paypal alertpay etc, Visa and mastercard setup will be a bit difficult for you at this stage