A Good storefront

[mattison]

Here's the story. I have a competitor for a new muse I'm doing that uses the yahoo storefront. It's looks really unprofessional to me. I positive I can blow them out of the water with my knowledge and customer service. What do you guys recommend for storefronts? Should i go with something like yahoo(premade) or should i go with something a programmer can make. Thanks in advance!

[sub8hr]

I've been trying to track down similar advice. Yahoo stores haven't had any major updates in a loooong time, and the company is going through crisis laying off half their employees right now so I wouldn't count on them revamping it any time soon.

I've been thinking about trying Volusion, which is another hosted solution. There are a few things I don't like about it upfront, so I'm kind of hesitant. Wondering what others have come up with as I have yet to find a host that really knocks my socks off.

I've heard good things about Magento and Zen Cart for downloadable carts. I have no experience with them, but it seems like it might be a bit more technical hassle than it's worth for the one man startup unless you already have access to a good programmer.

[mattison]

I was just looking at Volusion. What don't you like about it if i may ask? So far it looks like my best option although i just gave it a very quick look and need to look at it more.

[sub8hr]

1) Monthly fees are related to number of products you list. There are also some potential bandwidth/storage issues you might run in to that you don't have with Yahoo.

2) Category and product page URLs are dynamically generated with .ASP (or something to that effect) which leads to odd page URL names that you can't edit. It may not even make that much difference, but from an SEO perspective it's better to have a nice clean yourdomain.com/myproduct.html rather than something like yourdomain.com/s/myproduct/prod14093/s.html.

Also, if you ever decide to port your store to another host or go the downloadable route, the product URLs will be a pain in the ass to migrate.

[mattison]

Thanks for the info. Looks like i'm going with yahoo. I appreciate this message board and what it does. I know i can get some great info from some people.

[sub8hr]

If you're going with Yahoo store, another resource you might be interested in is www.solidcactus.com. They do custom site design and can build in functionality to your store like cross selling on the product description pages and recently viewed items that regular Yahoo store is lacking. Cross selling is so ridiculously important I can't believe the only solution Yahoo has for it is the crappy in cart cross seller that you have to upgrade to a higher service level to even use. Solid Cactus are also the only people I've talked to who've consistently returned my calls in a timely manner and been able to explain exactly what I would get for my money.

I've also been taking a look at what it takes to get a Magento installation up and running. I've taken a deeper look at their previews and test drives, and the software is very, very awesome. I'll post more on my findings later if anyone is interested.

[kamakiri]

I know less than you guys, but anticipate running through the same hoops in the near future.

As a complete shiroto, I have heard good things about google and amazon. Are there reasons they didn't even come up in your thread?

[sub8hr]

Google doesn't have a storefront, what they have is Google checkout that can be implemented as a payment method in your online store.

Surprisingly, I just haven't seen a lot of info out there about Amazon webstore. I've been digging up shopping cart reviews and other forums, and there hasn't been a single mention of it on these other sources either. Even Googling it, I didn't come up with that much other than people asking insufficiently answered questions about it. From what I gather, their webstore product is a lot newer than other webstores and hasn't got much traction yet. You'd think it would be good though... I mean, it's Amazon, largest etailer on the net. But then again, you'd think eBay's ProStores would be good, but they aren't that amazing either. Would be great if someone can post some links if they've found any good info on this.

[CashCache]

Yahoo is very ugly and the last time I looked at Google’s solution, your customer HAD to have a Google account setup. After using Yahoo for about 60 days I decided to write my own interfaces to my CC clearing processor and PayPal. It’s a lot more work up front, but it has a few added benefits:

1. Make it look and behave like you want – not how they want.
2. No more pushing your customers off your site and on to someone else’s site.
3. Cheaper – I pay 2.6% through my processor and a fixed $45 per month for the gateway.
4. Ability to change the backend without your customers knowing anything changed.

I could go on and on. Everyone’s needs are different – this is just what worked for me. I have to make my own changes from time to time, but it’s worth it.

If these publicly hosted solutions don’t work for you, you may want to shop this around on Elance and see what comes back. If you can code and you don’t want to jump through all the hoops to get a merchant account, check out PayPal’s API Gateway. I am sure you can find stock solutions using this product.

[mattison]

Well now i'm going to hold off. I don't want to make a bad choice.

Sub8hr - would love to get your review on Magento

Cashcache - Thanks for the info.

[jpo]

I don't really have a comparison to share since I didn't compare solutions side by side.

For a recent project, I picked a company on Elance to do the development and they used ZenCart. I like it becuase of no fees (we process checkout through PayPal and host it on our existing server), so outside of the up-front design cost, it doesn't cost any more money.

I had never used ZenCart, so there was a bit of a learning curve with the admin side, but was pretty easy to use. There are good tutorials for it and lots of help on the forums.

I don't love the standard set-up for some of the categoeies, but the designers through Elance made all the necessary parts look good.

It's still new and our contacts have said they like it, but hopefully it will lead to sales with the general public when it starts getting found in the search engines and we start marketing.

Good luck.

[sub8hr]

jpo, if you don't mind sharing curious how much the development work cost you and what kind of hosting fees are required for zencart to run well.

[mattison]

I was looking at posts from other websites and one website
http://oksushi.com/article/what-i-have-learned-about-magento

talked about about Magento and Zen Cart. A guy posted his site in magento

http://70.32.112.22/ and then in Zen Cart http://www.gobibledownloads.com/

I think the Zen Cart looks better and he says it's most customizable. Sucks i'm so stupid when it comes to programming and web development. Other sites i've checked out seem to be running into the same problems with the customizable stuff with magento. Just sharing what i've read. Might just be useful for me but i appreciate all of your responses in this post.

[sub8hr]

I think the reason for the general lack of support for Magento is that it is much newer. It looks like the first official release of Magento was early 2008, whereas ZenCart has been around much longer. Seem to need a programmer to make much real change in any shopping cart though. ZenCart may be lacking in dynamic features like "recently viewed items" if that means anything to you. The evidence trail just doesn't seem to converge well for any cart...

Something a bit more worrying I discovered poking trough Magento sites is that Google may have trouble indexing the pages. I was seeing sites with PR 3-5 homepages, but "no pr info available" for the category pages. Not even low PR, or PR 0, we're talking PR bar grayed out. Something must be going on there, but haven't figured out what it is.

[sub8hr]

Just checked out some ZenCart sites. Looks like it generates pages on the fly with different session IDs which is a major red flag. Different session ID every time = different page every time which means Google can't index it, and those pages will not accumulate PR or display in the SERPs.

[kamakiri]

OK I need to hijack this a bit longer. I am working on my muse this week and am still about a month off going live, but can those of you who know a bit more about it take a look and tell me what I need:

GameBRAIN (http://gamebrain.us)

I kind of though that google checkout, amazon and yahoo were the same until someone mentioned they weren't. Just a few questions (and please add anything else that comes to mind.)

Which service would you recommend?
Is having a star saying paypal verified worthwhile?

[sub8hr]

Yahoo/Amazon stores are the entire shop including all the pages, not just the shopping cart as it might seem. Google checkout is literally just the little button that takes you off to checkout via Google's interface. For a one product shop you probably don't need a full on ecommerce software, just integrate the checkout buttons on the right page. I'm not the techiest when it comes to these things, so you'd probably want to have someone look at it to make sure it was secure enough if you go that route though. Not for certain, but I'm guessing that's how Tim's Body Building site is set up. Taking a look at the page source, all of the CSS is in the main index file which is generally a sign that it was not made be a commercial website company.

PayPal Verified logo is probably worth it.

Check out some of the logos here.

http://www.myweddingfavors.com/

In particular, the McAfee site scan seems to be widely recognized, but it's like $1000 upfront and might not be worth it until you get going along. A lot of people also swear by putting up Trust-E and shipping logos like UPS (assuming that you are legitimately using those services of course). BBB Accredited Business is great, but you have to have been online with a clean record for a year to be eligible.

[sub8hr]

Alright guys, here goes nothing =x. I'm moving my Yahoo Store stuff (what little there is of it so far) to Magento. These are the main reasons:

-Great flexibility and out of the box features that would cost $1000s to implement in Yahoo
-Potentially lower operating costs
-Ability to control multiple stores through the same admin tool

I'm having it hosted through nexcess.net who is going to do the Magento install for me for free (FREE!). The Magento team itself would charge you $150 for an assisted install, though there are DIY instructions.

It looks like my hosting fees are going to be way cheaper, not to mention I won't be paying a preposterous 1.5% of gross sales to Yahoo--may not sound like much, but if you figure the different between 10% and 8.5% net profit that's 15% of your profits! The savings compounds itself since I will be able to run multiple stores through the same interface instead of tacking another $40-$300/mo on to the bill with additional Yahoo stores.

I figure I will experiment with outsourcing until I find someone competent to do regular page work for me, rather than do a "big bang" site creation with a place that is going to charge me $3k+. It was a tough call. I really got warm fuzzies from Solidcactus.com about doing up the Yahoo store, but long term Yahoo just doesn't look like the way to go. Too bad Solid Cactus doesn't do Magento.

What I am admittedly giving up by doing so:

-The warm fuzzy reliability of knowing I can call up Yahoo and get something handled within 24 hours without racking up additional charges when things go wrong
-A more established support community of designers and support providers based around Yahoo stores

What I may arguably be giving up:

-Software updates and maintenance by Yahoo, though I'm not convinced they actually have or will do any. Looks like the store and all it's problems have been largely the same for the past 5 years.
-A fully debugged shopping cart. Magento is new, open source, and still under development. There seem to be reports of bugs here and there. Unless of course Yahoo does in fact have bugs I don't know about (which I wouldn't be surprised), and simply doesn't do anything about them.

[jpo]

Edit: Just saw your other post so my reply was probably to late, but Magento sounds pretty good - we might have to check it out in the future.

Sub8hr,
No I don’t mind sharing. As mentioned, our ZenCart site was outsourced through Elance (using a firm called Ether). The development costs were less than $500. They set-up the site. We had our own images, added content, products, prices & manage it through the backend. If you want to see how it turned out, see www.DesignerWindowBlinds.com

I already had a site hosted on godaddy for something like $5 a month and there was plenty of room on it, so we added this on to that account so there was no extra fee to us. Since we process transactions through paypal, we didn’t need to pay for a secure server.

…so, it was set-up affordably, but that was the point at first. As sales grow, we can always upgrade.

You mentioned the issues with search engines and that’s our next task. I not an expert here [if anyone is, input is more than welcome], but the home page and product pages seem ok as they have their own title, meta tags, etc. The others do not as they are id’s. It may be an issue, but since our sales model was largely based on our connections and the affiliate program to drive sales since we’re not sure if we would complete with the competitors with $300,000+ sites, it may not as important to us, but we’ll see as time goes on.

[sub8hr]

@jpo

You might have a hard time cracking a generic search phrase like "window blinds" but there are a ton of tier 2 searches for blinds. If you went after "Wood Blinds" for example, it would probably be fairly easy to get in to the top 10 search results. The volume wouldn't be amazing, but get on enough SERPs and it could add up.

[sub8hr]

Update on Storefronts. I've become hopelessly frustrated with Magento. The out of the box version comes woefully inadequate for getting a simple store launched. You can't even use the default template without getting knee deep in the code to remove/replace demo store elements. Development for Magento seems to be expensive if for no other reason than it's a cluster to work with.

After careful consideration of numerous elements, I've concluded that I will just never get my store off the ground if I keep getting caught up in web development and finding the "best" shopping cart. So I've decided to stick with the Yahoo store and get moving with a developer whose consistently shown they want my business and I believe is going to give me good customer service based on my interaction so far.

My main gripe with Yahoo store is still the revshare they charge you for processing transactions, but after weighing the cost of other solutions it looks like you still wind up paying one way or another. Volusion dings you on the bandwidth charges, standalone carts wind up getting you on the support you need to keep them up and maintain them, unless you have the technical expertise to do most of it yourself (but there are probably better things to do with your time).

We'll see how it goes. Side note, I'm cutting myself off from information about new tricks and tactics and any over complicated materials with fantastical maps of how if I just do these 100 activities on top of what I already have to do I will make a gajillion $. I am going to replace those with materials that talk about cutting to the core of what needs to be done and just getting it done. Getting stuck in the "learning" trap is bad when it becomes an excuse for not taking action.

[mattison]

Understand completely. I myself and going with zencart and having a website developer make it. He knows way more than i do so i'm going to trust him in this. My brother in law knows somebody who can do it cheap for me, so i'm hopefully getting a good deal. I also been getting caught up in things and been doing nothing.

[francesca917]

i've read and appreciate everyone's views on recommendations on which provider to go with for building an e-commerce site.

i have a simple question...like the "french shirt" example from the 4 hour work week, i only want to sell (and transact) a SINGLE product on-line, yet i very much want my e-commerce site to look very professional, since it's not a cheap product.

i have never built a site before, or know anything about programming, and budget is an issue. what would be your recommendation for the resources i should use to build my e-commerce site?

thanks much!!!!!:

[webgal]

Use wordpress and add a paypal button. Downloading wordpress and using a theme is found on free stuff on my website link below.

[ericnyc]

Use wordpress and add a paypal button. Downloading wordpress and using a theme is found on free stuff on my website link below.

Webgal,
I am thinking about writing an ebook. I just read your PDF about installing word press and also looked at word press site and i did not find anything about processing payments/pay pal.
Do you have a link where i can read about it? Also, do you know if it is possible to use Google Analytics with WordPress?

Thank you

[webgal]

It is possible to use google analytics with wordpress. It's a plugin. I'd also recommend adding statcounter.

I think there may be some kind of paypal plugin. Nathan Hagan is on this board and he's used a paypal button on wordpress. So look up paypal plugin wordpress.

I've not used the one below but it's an example of what I mean.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/

I will, in the future add that to the tutorial.

[ericnyc]

Thank you for the replies.

What do you thinks about www.payloadz.com

[Viers442]

I am looking at using 1shoppingcart (http://www.1shoppingcart.com/) to integrate into my Wordpress blog when my product goes live.

Here are a few of the pluses I found with 1Shoppingcart.

- They will handle the merchant account credit card processing via 3rd party
- Automated e-mails to customers
- Ability have up to 2000 products and 10000 customers
- Customizable
- Support for multiple sites
- Affiliate processing
- Recurring billing
- Domain name intergration

The list goes on and on....The basic service is $35 month to 1shoppingcart and to add credit card processing it is an additional $25/month with $.30/transaction and 2.19%+.

These costs are cheaper than what Bank of America Merchant Services wants to charge me and I do not need to find a coder to intergrate the shopping cart for me.

I am excited to try it out, does anyone already have experience using 1shoppingcart?

[reapr]

Just get a hosting account that has fantastico ... such as bluehost.

Then install ecommerce through fantastico. Then search around the web and pay someone to create a custom template for 20-100 bucks.