I’m needing to get a new website set-up for my buisness, and am looking for suggestions for what platform to base it on.
The product range will only be a handful of items, however there will be various options for some of them, so I need some degree of flexibility.
Payment will be solely through PayPal for the moment.
My initial thought is something wordpress based combined with using paypal for the cart, as it would be relatively simple, allow me some degree of flexibility, and I’d quite like to add some blog posts/articles.
However should I be looking at something more ecommerce orientated?
I’m open to trying a few different options, but am keen to here what others would suggest, and not waste hours trying packages that are likely to be overkill for what I’d like to acheive.
If you only have a handful of items and are using paypal, then at a bare minimum you could use the buttons generator within your paypal control panel, and then copy and paste the code into any html page - this means you can essentially use any cms that fits your desired level of complexity
However should I be looking at something more ecommerce orientated?
I have tried an ecommerce site and they are complicated to setup initially. They include stock control etc. as well which you may not use but still needs setting up.
I have tried a simple home built ecommerce site with a few items in a table with paypal buttons and it works. You can set the buttons up dynamically with php and there is a paypal sandbox you can use for testing.
When you start to get into options - I have been there and am still trying to sort out a usable site home built or ecommerce - it gets complicated. If one option replaces another and the price is different or if the user picks one option they need to have another option to go with it or drop something else it starts to get complicated very quickly
In the end I went for the user sending through an email order, the site owner checks it for the different options and he sends them a paypal request payment. As I say I am trying to get away from this but in the situation I am in it seems the only viable way.
It’s almost impossible for anyone to make an informed recommendation without a lot more information about your needs. There is no perfect solution, because everyone’s needs are different. There’s only a perfect solution for you.
Do you need inventory management? If so, do you need inventory tracking on product options (like colors and sizes)? That will really limit your options, because a lot of the open source and inexpensive shopping carts that you can just install on your site don’t have option-level inventory tracking.
What about shipping and fulfillment? Will you need real-time integration with UPS, FedEx, USPS or just flat rate shipping based on order total/weight? Or will you be drop-shipping?
Are you selling physical or downloadable products? Will you need to calculate sales tax? Do you need merchandising, coupon codes, etc?
If you decide to go with WordPress, WP E-commerce is one of the most popular plugins. It’s nowhere near as full-featured as ANY actual shopping cart or hosted e-commerce solution like Shopify or Bigcommerce, though.
The comment about your needs is very on-point. The shopping cart platform that you ultimately wind up using is really going to depend on what you need to accomplish with your online selling.
If you can’t really get what you want out of something like WordPress, Magento is another option that a lot of online sellers use and love. Small and medium businesses alike use Magento, and some of the biggest retailers out there use it, too. This is because there’s a Community Edition (which is free and open source) as well as an Enterprise Edition.
The thing is, there can be a pretty steep learning curve when it comes to Magento. A lot of sellers like to hire a licensed Magento developer to help them set up their Magento webstores and get everything working properly. If you DO want tackle things yourself, there are a ton of great forums and message groups – both official and otherwise – that can help you learn whatever it is you want to learn how to do with Magento.
You can also go with something that’ll work right out of the box. Turnkey solutions like Bigcommerce and 3dCart are really popular with smaller online sellers, because they’re incredibly easy to use and it doesn’t take a whole bunch of skill/expertise/training to set up your own webstore and actually have it looking pretty awesome, too.
hi if you want to start an e-commerce store then go for magento its little bit easy then other and now a day there are lots of option for customization
Simpler than wordpress with woocommerce is Opencart. You can have your site up and running in one day, if you use a template. And it`s easy to maintain
