Design Counts

Ecommerce – shopping cart

Start selling online with a shopping cart, ecommerce solution to meet your needs. You can sell physical goods such as books or t-shirts, or sell creative solutions with digital downloads (software, web templates) or services you provide such as website design.

I have some experience helping a friend with technical support for a successful online shop for several years and I am currently working on developing a new ecommerce website selling specialist gifts. For many people this is the solution they are looking for, a way to sell something they make or buy wholesale – for a profit. Other people provide digital goods such as software, games, website and blog templates or other electronic product that can be downloaded from a website as a digital file. For others it will be providing a service such as computer support, consultancy, database development, and website design or similar, or even marketing their own holiday accommodation – the list is endless, whatever can be sold in a shop can probably be sold online.

To allow you to be paid for these online transactions you need a way of selling and receiving payments from customers and this can be a pre-packaged ecommerce shop solution or software (often known as shopping cart software or scripts) you can download and install on your website. Choosing the best one for you will depend on what you are selling and how confident you are with website development. In many cases it will be easier to buy a pre-packaged solution from a website hosting company or ecommerce provider that best meets your needs. 

Most people have the ability to sell; you may have had a stall at a car boot sale where you sold off unwanted items, or things you have made. You may have sold online using eBay and want to have your own online shop, or want a way of making additional money; many thousands of people make a living by selling online.

Selling online can be difficult to set up and manage yet it is within the capability of nearly everyone. Even if you have nothing to sell now, you may come up with a good business idea and be able to develop an online shop that will help support your lifestyle or give you a little bit more income to top up your pension or day job.

Payment Gateways

For you to receive money for something you sell you need to be able to provide a quick, secure, reliable and trusted way of taking payment. Most people who start up an online shop will use a payment gateway such as WorldPay, PayPal, Google Checkout to name a few. These secure payment systems let people enter their payment details using a credit or debit card and then will transfer the money to you on completion of the payment process. For doing this they make a service charge – either a standard monthly cost plus a percentage of the payment, or a percentage of the money received. The cost to you can be 1-5% and is sometimes called a handling charge.

Why pay this? There are other options if you are an established business for most people starting out you will need to use a Payment Gateway to take payments for your online sales.

Choosing how to Sell Online

As mentioned earlier you can buy a bespoke online shop solution from a hosting company or a specialist ecommerce provider or set up your own online shop using shopping cart software. Some of these are free, some shopping scripts are open source (and free), while others are paid commercial software that can cost a few hundred pounds to a lot more. What should you choose? This decision and others depends on what you plan to sell, how complicated the merchandise is (does it have a lot of purchase options i.e. colour, size, fittings etc), the number of products you plan to list, if you want to use the online shop system for order management along with other factors.

Keep it Simple

If you plan to sell individual products, or are selling items very cheaply then the simplest solutions is often the best one – set up an eBay store and sell online. There is many people making a good living, second incomes and supplementing their retirement with eBay. The advantages of selling with eBay, and there is many, include having no need to know website design or technical aspects of running an online store. You can have a worldwide audience and eBay provides the resources for you to market your products online. The disadvantages include the fees incurred and the lack of corporate or brand identity for your business. The other disadvantage is that most people are looking for cheap goods and low prices on eBay, it may therefore not be suitable for your products.

Keep it Simple Stage II – Sell with Free PayPal Shopping Scripts

So you definitely want to sell online and you want to sell from your own website as it already has regular visitors who are interested in what you have on offer. You also want to have more control over what you sell and wish to keep your costs down. PayPal provides a number of free shopping scripts that will allow you to sell from your website or blog. I personally feel they are a bit clunky and would suggest these scripts (usually small JavaScript programmes) are only suitable where people normally just buy a single item at a time and you list only a small number of items for sale.

For a more sophisticated free PayPal shopping script have a look at http://www.fatfreecart.com/ I like how this handles orders and it smoothly interacts with your website.

Not So Simple – Just Sophisticated and Integrated

We have got beyond the relatively simple PayPal shopping scripts and recognise we need or want something more sophisticated to meet our current and future requirements – we are on our way to our first million so think big! You want a shopping system that can handle hundreds of items, integrate seamlessly with Payment Gateways (PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payment, WorldPay or other recognised payment services) and lets you manage everything online. You have a number of choices; pay for an online ecommerce system or setup your own shopping script.

Ecommerce Solutions The advantages of using a pre-built ecommerce solution is just that, it is a solution and all the software side of things is taken care of, you just need to focus on uploading details of the items you are selling, marketing your products, making sales and fulfilling your sales orders. It can take a lot of worry away when someone else is responsible for the shop security and keeping the ecommerce software up-to-date with security patches and upgrades. You just need to be the online merchant, keeping your customers happy. If you want to use an ecommerce solution then have a look at Big Commerce as the options and shop plans they offer will cover most merchant’s needs. To see it in action for a small home based business then have a look at Making Your Own Candles run from a cottage in Wales!

Doing it your way – having your very own website and online shop! Online ecommerce is by the nature of it very competitive and if you use an online shop from one of the major hosting companies the site will look like many others, it will not usually be very customisable in its look and feel and you are restricted with what is provided. So the other solution that many people choose to make is to have their own website and online shop using a shopping script (software) that can be tweaked to make it unique to you. This software is installed on your own website and if you plan to have a very active online shop you may even need a dedicated server. So what options do we have for this ecommerce solution – we can go Open Source (free software) or use a paid shopping script.

Open Source Shopping Scripts Open Source can be an excellent way to develop your online shop as the code used to run the online shop can be changed to meet your specific needs, and the product, if popular, is supported by thousands of users who contribute in many different ways. The disadvantage of Open Source software is that it does tend to have many more releases and upgrades of the software than commercially available software. You will find several Open Source shop scripts available and you should spend time looking at, and evaluating several of them before making a final decision on what to use. I personally like Prestashop as this software is (mostly) free and allows you to create a full ecommerce solution that will suit most vendors.

Paid Ecommerce Shop Scripts Paid for shopping scripts – well as you can imagine there is a fair number of companies offering ecommerce solutions based on their paid software. Many offer excellent products and I can’t help with reviews of them all as I have not used or worked with most of them. I can tell you that a good place to start is ecommerce templates – http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/ as I have purchased one of their scripts and I am very pleased with the product. If you do not have any, or much, website design knowledge and you want to get online and start selling with ecommerce templates then bite the bullet and pay for them to set up your ecommerce site. It may cost you a few hundred pounds to do it this way, however you will be up and selling before you know it.

Before You Start an Online Business An online business is no different from any other business, you need a plan, and you need money and time to make it successful. You need to have a product that people want to buy, in other words there has to be a market for what you are selling. So before you start make a business plan, carry out marketing research, and cost out if you can make a profit. For most online businesses you will need to pay for advertising so factor this in and be realistic – for every 100 paid clicks you may only make 1 sale. If the cost of these 100 clicks is more than your profit on the item sold you will very quickly lose a lot of money. An online shop can be cheaper to set up and run than a physical corner shop in a high street yet you will still have many of the same costs; you will need to have a stock of products you plan to sell, you will have postage and delivery costs, you may need to pay for office and storage costs as well as staff, insurance and other running costs.  I am not trying to put you off, just be realistic and plan carefully.

Other resources http://www.hotscripts.com/category/php/scripts-programs/e-commerce/shopping-carts/ for a list of paid and free shopping scripts listed on hotscrips.com

If you fancy using WordPress and your online shop then check out the following themes and plugins for ideas.  Please note I have not tested these so they are not recommended as such, you will need to do your own research on them. You can see an example of this shopping script plus some of the paid plugin work on http://icondock.com/

Intinct from New Zealand have a e-commerce WordPress Plugin as well as their premium paid version on http://getshopped.org/ for the cost of a meal out you can buy a e-commerce plugin for WordPress that can make you a bundle.

From Wicked WordPress Themes – http://www.wicked-wordpress-themes.com/wordpress-classifieds/shopperpress/