I've been using the very excellent Mambo CMS for the past few months. I absolutely love it and learn more about it each day. I recently lost my day job and have decided to add e-commerce to my site. I'd like to open a small shop that offers 10-12 PDA accessory items. I've been looking for info on the web and have "too much" information. I need feedback on which payment processor to use -- should I work within Mambo? -- should I use a subdomain with static html? -- some very straightforward steps on how to get this up and running with minimal costs. Basically, my head is spinning and I just need some rock solid advice on how I should build this into my site. I don't want to build something and then find out, "I signed up for a payment processor that's going to charge enormous fees". "I should have just gone the PayPal route". "I shouldn't have incorporated into my CMS". Here's an outline of what I think my steps for successfully launching my store: - Contact my host and get a dedicated IP address - Decide if this will be built within Mambo or seperate - Decide on a shopping cart (use Mambo phpShop or other?) - Decide on a payment processor? - Set up process - cart and payment processor integration (Make this whole process work) - Decide if it should be in a subdomain and what is the most search engine friendly route - Build it - Promote it (possibly set up Affiliate Program) - I've been actively promoting my site as a "resource center". Should I start changing my submissions to be more "store" oriented. Sorry for all the questions and if I'm not clear. Any and all help is appreciated. I'm so lucky to have found these forums. They have helped out immeasurably. I'm anxoious to move on with this store -- just want to take the right steps. Thanks. Chris
If you have more time than money, go with OScommerce or Zen Cart, both are free shopping carts that you can mod.
I'm in the US. I've messed around with OS Commerce, but it appears to be overkill. It also has a somewhat unprofessional look. I will give Zen Cart a look.
I use MonsterCommerce for customer eCommerce based sites, great customizable cart, built in everything, RackSpace hosting etc, but for some people its a bit much - $100 month to start. Its worth checking out as their customer service is way cool - even the companies president frequents the support forum. plus they have the live chat, a ticketing system, and 24 hr phones I've seen similar systems for a bit less - but with-out any personal experiance using nay of these I can't recommend for or against them.
As far as the electronic gateway, the bigger ones are LinkPoint, Verisign, and Authoriznet.com. The LinkPoint payment gateway is probably one of the strongest out there. It is owned by the First Data Corporation. First Data has been doing electronic money transfers since 1871 and they were the first processor of both VISA® and MasterCard® bank-issued credit cards in 1976. First Data processed 12.2 billion transactions in North America alone in 2003. LinkPoint does not charge anything extra for the transactions and its recurring billing module is free Authorize.net is probably the most advertised electronic gateway. A lot of people think they can sign up with them and immediately start to accept credit cards. They do not release you need a merchant account as well. Authorize.net even uses the First Data platform to help facilitate transaction processing. Auth.net charges about $.10 per transaction and also charges about $25 a month for its recurring billing. Verisign also has a payment gateway. Verisign is probably the most recognized name because they also offer other services and products for the internet (i.e. SSL certificates, domain registration, hosting, etc). You do not need to purchase everything from Verisign to have a successful e-commerce business. Verisign does give about 500-1,000 free transactions a month and has a good fraud protection plan.
We've also created a Mambo powered site and have been very happy with the cms so far. There are still many components that need to be built out... but the raw chasis is nice and easy to set up. We have even built our own custom component without much trouble. Sorry, can't help on the cart side since I'm not using one at this point, but wanted to drop my .02 about mambo.
So many questions... Right now, I have a site that's a resource center. It contains news, stories, reviews, etc. The layout of the site (portal layout) works great for this purpose. I was thinking of going with a subdomain --- www.store.mysite.com. However, I've found out that Google sees this as a new domain. Now, I'm thinking it might be best to separate these two - resource site and store. Of course, I'd be advertising my store and linking back throughout and wouldn't want any Google penalties. Right now, I'm running a few successful affiliate programs, so my visitors don't have a problem linking off my site to purchase. Now, they would be visiting my store as opposed to my affiliates. Then I could SEO each appropriately. This sounds a bit high, but I was impressed with the site samples. It looks like it would be easy to set up a very professional looking store if I have a color scheme, logo and good product shots. Did they help out with payment gateways, merchant accounts etc? That's where I really struggle. Do they help promote your store at all? Thanks. Chris
I used to use 1shoppingcart It's not so bad but can be slow (and quite expensive if your store takes off) I now use amember (geared for membership sites but I use for 40 products) -- vastly improved conversions as it's 100% customisable (if you know html and a bit of php)
Ive used CubeCart for 8 months and its easy to work with and has not gone wrong plus free There are lots of mods and a freindly forum OK its for the small guys and if your doing 100k then put the money up but I love cubecart Not sure its what your are looking for but worth a click http://www.cubecart.com/site/home/
X-Cart has a rich set of features, good community support (even thought it's not free), and uses the excellent smarty template system, so easily to customize the look. Edit: Also, it has search engine friendly URLs
Authorize.net seems to be the most compatible with shopping cart systems. By going through Wells Fargo, they waived all the setup fees and WF is pretty responsive to questions so far. I've not had to deal directly with Authorize.net.
I'm not familiar with this. How does it work? Is it easy to customize the look and feel. From what I've seen, most of the x-Cart stores look similar. I'm looking for a very clean professional "Apple Store" type look and feel. Right now, I'm leaning towards MonsterCommerce. It looks like they have a very proven system and easy admin. I just have to confirm the ability to customize the templates and layout of the store. Plus, I'd like to see their ability to do affiliate programs.
A few things - the last time we checked on Wells Fargo - they requred a three-year contract. This might be a lot for some people. As far as MonsterCommerce - the major complaints I have heard from them - they nickel and dime you on a few things, and when you complain your server is slow, they request upwards to $1,000 to improve the server or move you
You can customise everything down to the smallest detail in X-Cart, all the page elements are template driven. X-Cart also has an affiliate module.
Thats true about Monster - while they use RackSpace hosting which is fast and reliable if you start getting real traffic you outgrow your bandwidth allowance - it can get quite expensive as the next levels of hosting can run into hundreds of dollars a month.
Since you are using Mambo I believe the best choice would be to use one of mambos 3rd party ecommerce components like phpShop and MosCommerce. As for choosing which domain to host the shop on. You might want to consider: 1) You may want to use your existing mambo users database. If you set up a seperate domain, you will need to either apply one of Mambos multi domain hacks or users will have to register again at your shop. 2) Both Mambo PHPShop and MosCommerce install files in folders outside the components root in mambo. You may not want to have your main site populated with the ecommerce files which may hinder upgrades. You have to look into this as this if just from personal experience. 3) If you are going to use a seperate sub domain. Then its probably best just to use one of great stand alone shopping carts available open source. OsCommerce, X-Cart, ZenCart, Cube Cart etc etc. Trying to customize most of these though can be daunting. As for choosing which Ecommerce package to use. Both moscommerce and phpShop have most the needed online shop features. MosCommerce is OSCommerce for mambo, so it still inherits the "hard to customize" model of OSCommerce. I've found going through OSCommerce files trying to customize just one button can take a few hours. (never tried it twice though).