Setup an e-commerce website
There are many different options open to you when it comes to selling your products online these include:
- Get your own e-commerce website
- Selling on Amazon
- Selling on Ebay
In this article I’m going to talk about the different ways to get your website online for selling, and the pros and cons of each.
There are 3 main ways of getting your own e-commerce website up:
1. Do it yourself
2. Get an expert to set up an existing E-commerce system for your website
3. Developing a completely bespoke E-commerce website
do it yourself
The simplest way
Maybe you already have a basic non-eccomerce website, and want to manually write the html to show pictures of say 5 products and have the ability to put buy now buttons on those products. A number of big players such as google and paypal allow you to do this. Without having to set up databases and all the rest of it.
How I hear you ask well because they take care of all the processing and recording on their websites, you just set up an account with them, simple. All that’s required is that you add specific links on your website that will take the customer to hosted payment website where your product’s details reside and the customer can pay for it there then return to your site. The links and button’s codes are generated when you sign up and enter the product details you intend on selling.
Setting up you own E-commerce system
If you do want to set up your own fully functioning cart there are basically 2 ways you can go:
1. Your host may have a feature to set up an e-commerce website by using one of their tools. This way you click a few buttons and your e-commerce shop is set up and ready for you to customise and upload your products to.
2. You set up it yourself, run the database scripts etc …
The beauty of the first solution is that you don’t have to mess around with databases or computer code (such as php or java), in anyway.
The second way basically accomplishes what was done the first way. But you need to be a little more technically competent, although is fairly straightforward for those who are confident with computers.
Both of these solutions are a good way to get online for the first time and have a play around. But the more you want to customise your solution you may find that you may start to need some expert help. It really depends on how much you know and how much you want to know about the technical side of things.
Examples of Open Source E-commerce systems that you could set up are:
- osCommerce has attracted a large growing e-commerce community that consists of over 205,400 store owners
- Zen Cart is another good free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software.
Both osCommerce and Zen Cart offer an exhaustive list of functionality and incorporate the typical features that most website owners want from a shopping cart and reports that allow them to get appropriate stats about their products and sales.
Get an expert to set up an existing E-commerce system for your website
There are a number of website development companies as well as freelance web developers that will develop an E-commerce website using an existing system (either open source or a paid alternative). Making sure that the templates, layout designs and configurations are correct, to your liking; work efficiently and in line with your customer’s expectations. And also will customise the code for you should you like a feature that does not already exist in the E-commerce system.
The good thing about this approach is you get something put together quickly, with a solution that is tried and tested by an expert/s who knows what they are doing. Obviously it costs more that doing it yourself, but frees you to concentrate on driving your business forward and not the low level details of setting up your website.
Developing a bespoke E-commerce website
There are times when an existing solution won’t do and you need something that you want to be able to fully customise to your own needs. None of the big online brands use an off the shelf product for there e-commerce solution they develop their own.
You may want features, behaviour and look and feel that is different from anything else out there. If you want the ability to customise to exactly the way you want, then you should consider a fully bespoke website.
The upside is you get exactly what you want (provided you have a clear of what it is that you want). The downside it will cost a lot more than using an existing system.
Need more information? Feel free to contact us with your questions