First eCommerce site

I am building a website for a client and they wish to add a small shop section (only 20 or so items), this is my first time with eCommerce and I will have to learn as I go along. I have purchased the required software and it seems straight forward enough to integrate it into the website I am building but I just have a quick question if anyone can help.

Are there any special hosting/server requirements I need to ensure I have on my current hosting package before I tell the client I can definatly do this?

The hosting requirements will vary by the type of software and payment method you plan to use.

Do you have an ecommerce package in mind? Will you take credit cards directly on the site or will people be sent to a third party like paypal to transact?

No, you need nothing more from the hosting, as it`s a small ecommerce, you should accept payment through 3rd party gateways like PayPal.

Have you considered something like BigCommerce?

Magento is the best platform for that, you should analyze your product first then check market place for that then go for it.

Yes …You are right you go with PayPal…

I do need to object to one or two of the comments here regarding PayPal. Although we certainly recommend having PayPal as one of the payment options that customers are offered, having only PayPal will really hurt a website’s conversions rate. Although we may know that it is not necessary to have a PayPal account to use a credit card, when people are taken off of your website to make a payment on PayPal’s website, PayPal makes it seem like you need to set up an account. Many people do not want to set up an account and will leave the page (and your website) immediately - right when they were about to make a purchase! Also, because PayPal has burned so many bridges over the years, there are hundreds of thousands of people who refuse to ever purchase through PayPal.

In our eCommerce training course we mention numerous times that you definitely want to have a real payment processor where you can take payments right on your website and offer PayPal as a backup payment method for people who have no credit and, thus, no credit card. We have seen websites double and triple their conversion rates immediately when they add a real payment processor. In fact, I built my career around flipping websites and the very first thing I looked at that told me I was going to be able to buy a website for less money than it was really worth is if they only accepted PayPal.

For small business i dont think that you have to worry about it, take 3rd party help for your transaction.
Yes you are right Mr. StoreCoach but for small business it may cost you lot.

If you can’t afford the few dollars a merchant account costs per month you probably don’t need [or aren’t ready for] your own store when there are already so many market options out there. As the old adage, goes… it takes money to make money and in ecommerce that is absolute true. People buy because they (a) want what you have and (b) are confident you’re the place to get it. Having the first without the second is not enough.

Thank you, Ted, for saying exactly what I was thinking.

We have a special agreement with Durango and they process all of our Store Coach members transactions for very good rates - usually in the 2.25-2.5% range (PayPal Standard is at 5%). You may very well be paying less in transaction fees using someone like Durango because PayPal’s fees are so high. Also, through our exclusive arrangement, Durango lets all of our people set up as many websites as they want under their one parent account, meaning they only have to pay one gateway fee per month - even if they have ten websites.

Even if you only have one website and you aren’t making a ton at the beginning, surely it is worth paying an extra $25 per month in order to double or triple your sales. If it isn’t, why are you wasting your time building the website? Unless you have built a website that has an average profit per order of only a few dollars, just one extra sale per month will pay for the real processor (we teach people not to waste their time if they don’t make AT LEAST $20-$25 profit per order, incidentally).

Have you considered Vendevor? It’s perfect for embedding an ecommerce section into an existing website (it’s one line of code) and the payment processor comes stock so you can immediately accept CC’s with no setup.

I just started an e-commerce site using Bigcommerce and am happy with usability and customer service. Plus, like someone said above, the monthly fee is not really that expensive considering you’re making money off of your site… I’m paying $40 a month and that’s not even the most inexpensive package. Good luck!

Get ready to getting mad because of Google then :slight_smile: