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.
- 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.
What I do is the last one on the list. I design a unique graphic design for you, and integrate it with a shop admin I designed so you can keep you site fresh without accidentally breaking your visual layout. The systems I create are easy to use, and are similar in complexity to checking your email with Hotmail or Yahoo.
learn about accepting credit cards »
view my portfolio »