online stores
As an online retailer, you have certain basic needs:- To display your products in an attractive and user-friendly online store
- To be able to display and change prices, photos, and descriptions quickly and easily
- To be able to add and edit informational pages like "About Us" and "Shipping Information"
- To have shopping cart functionality so your users can select items to purchase
- To integrate with a payment processor to complete online transactions (e-commerce)
- To be able to add and edit articles, links, and gallery photos
- To be able to solicit emails for a newsletter
- To set sale prices and offer discount vouchers
- To calculate realtime shipping prices
You can get these needs met in a variety of ways:
- Make the site yourself in FrontPage or Dreamweaver and add PayPal buttons (the easiest way to integrate e-commerce). This will let you control the content, but
it won't let you take advantage of the benefits of a database-driven system. It is likely to look amateurish unless you are also a professional designer, but it could get you started.
- Use an ecommerce service like Yahoo Stores or eBay to set up an online shop. This can give you access to tools like payment processing at a cheaper rate than your own merchant account, and some services (like eBay) are also a marketing channel which can be a big help when you're starting out. You'll be stuck with their template though as far as design goes.
- Buy a hosting package of your own and install one of the open source carts like ZenCart or a commercial cart. For a good rating of these, check out Shopping Cart Reviews.
These can be very robust, but tricky if you are new at this. You can hire a programmer to help install and customize it, and a designer to make it look great. Some carts have a community around it and searching in their forums can net some people who specialize in customizing a specific cart.
- Use a hosted full shopping cart solution like ClearCart. This gives you the benefit of a complex shopping cart solution without having to maintain the software or arrange hosting yourself. However there will probably be less you can do as far as customization compared to hosting it yourself.
- Hire a designer and a programmer (or someone who can do both) to create a system that does just what you need it to do and looks exactly how you want it to.
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