I am looking to upgrade a home run website selling products to a specific shopping cart package. I have looked at websites called aShop, bigcommerce, and a couple other similar ones. Around $25-35 per month with similar features, offering a free trial. Are these the best website to choose when making a basic shopping cart website?
I see some very low prices for places like iPage, justhost and inmotion. I haven’t really figured out what they have to offer software wise because they don’t offer free trials. They seem a little too good to be true, offering $100 for Adwords and $50 or so for Facebook advertising with very low per month costs? Not sure what to think about these.
Whats the best way to go? This is a pretty simple small website not offering loads of products. It has been on the web for a while but not where it should be looks and security wise. It shows up first in google for its given product which is huge right now. I will need this to stay the same when I switch it over which is also out of my knowledge. I know little about websites and very small amount of coding knowledge. Not a web designer, but looking to sell this product. Figured one of these websites offering to do it with thier software would be best. I have a good computer understanding and have used aShop’s free trial and gotten pretty much everything I need simply as the program is not hard to navigate with decent customer support.
I’d say open source is out of the picture because of my lack of knowledge on this subject.
There are lots of options for selling online, ranging from simple to complex. The easiest is to use something like PayPal, where you just place buttons on your page and the rest is handled by PayPal.
All the same, PayPal is pretty ugly on its own. You can use other external carts that cost a bit more but provide a nicer experience. An example is FoxyCart, where you can style the payment pages to look exactly like your site, even though they are off-site. Another popular one is Mal’s eCommerce (which you can use for free).
Then there are options where the whole site is hosted by a cart provider. These are nice in that you don’t have to worry about all the functionality. You just place your products and pay a monthly fee. Examples include Shopify and Goodsie and BigCommerce. There are some smaller ones, too, if you don’t have many products, like BigCartel.
Then you can just download the software for an entire CMS and host it on your own server. That gives you a lot of control, but puts a lot of responsibility in your hands—dealing with security, design, coding etc. Examples include Magento, osCommerce and ZenCart.
So there are lots of options there. If you want to keep your site but just add products to it with payment buttons, I’d suggest looking at something like FoxyCart.
Thank you. That does help. I really am not interested in keeping the website. It needs a lot of work. So I would be looking into a software, most likely where the entire site is hosted by a shopping cart provider like you said. I see some very low per month pricing from places like iPage, inmotion, and justHost that say they offer web hosting and web/shopping cart design. Wondering if anyone has experience with these cheaper per month places and the good and bads about starting a website with them.
You might get more specific help in the e-commerce section of the forums. If you’d like the thread moved there, just click the wee red flag by your post and ask.
