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Thread: I just shopified my site

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    Default I just shopified my site

    Hello,

    I was building my e-commerce website by hand and inserting paypal shopping cart buttons to process my orders. A friend of mine recommended Shopify.

    I was able to get an e-commerce website up and ready to roll in less than 2 hours. It truly cut down on all the coding I had to do by hand and the site looks quite professional.

    Who do you use to build your e-commerce website?

    Curious.

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    One of our sites is currently a Yahoo store, although I'm pushing for us to build our own cart. Another site uses X-Cart, which I don't think I would use again. It wasn't terribly easy to modify, particularly for someone who isn't all that informed about code.

    I think, eventually, we will either find an open source cart and modify it or we'll build our own. I'm pushing for build our own, but that takes longer and is more expensive.

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    It may simply be that I come from this with a different perspective and skillset, but I'm not a fan of any of the online stores. Coding isn't an issue for me, and that's about the only advantage I can see for using setups like Yahoo stores of Shopify.

    Granted they will make it easier for you to get set up and running, but I think they come with some cons.

    True you don't have to hand code anything, but that also means you give up a lot of control over what you can do with your site. At some point you'll likely want to add something that you won't be able to.

    In general the online stores are not particularly search friendly. It doesn't mean you can't get search traffic, but you are going to be at a disadvantage.

    In the long run these sites also end up costing more since you're paying a monthly fee for many things that you could really pay one time for instead. There are many free open source shopping carts available that also come with free or pay themes. You could hire someone to custom design and develop a theme and while you will have to pay up front for that you'll be paying a lot less per month for your hosting.

    I just looked at Shopify and see the most basic plan costs $24/month. More than 100 products and you're up to $59/month You can get similar hosting for less than $10/month. With their professional plan you're spending $600/year above the hosting.

    I think long term using an open source solution turns out to be a much better option.

    Now having said all that I don't really think it's bad to use an online store. It is going to be easier to set up and it is going to save money initially. It'll be easier for you to work on the site yourself.

    Still I couldn't see myself ever using an online ecommerce solution. The one advantage isn't one for me and I think the cons outweigh the pros.
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    one thing to add to Vangoghs post. Most, if not all online stores don't give you decent access to your product database. That makes moving your site from an online store to your own difficult. Say you have 1000 products. Do you really want to reenter all of the product info for that many products?

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    I'm not wild about the online store and it would not be my personal choice. On this one I got outvoted by IT. We had multiple products going and the owner wanted the store up NOW! So we went with a Yahoo store. It was only supposed to be a temporary option, but it has turned out to be a little less temporary than I would have liked.

    If I had my way, we'd build everything by hand and code it ourselves. My IT staff is wonderful and can always create new widgets and things that make out sites easier to use. Unfortunately, I'm not getting my way at the moment. I hate it when that happens.

    As a side note, if asked I would not recommend Yahoo stores. They're not very flexible at all.

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    And again I don't want to completely trash online stores. They certainly have the advantage of being easy to set up. For some that's the right way to go. They do save you from having to think about a number of things and worry about things. For example you won't have to get a secure sockets layer certificate to make your transactions secure.

    Overall I still think the better option is hosting your own solution whether or not it's something you develop custom or use open source.

    A lot of the things the stores make it so you don't have to worry about are things you may and probably will want to be able to control at some point and won't be able to. And like Bill mentioned it's sometimes difficult to move away from the online stores should you want to later. You can get locked into them and I think it's best not to lock your business into any one particular solution.
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    Its worth noting, that if you do go the online store route, start an excel sheet or something similar with your database. Every time you add a product or edit a product, do that in your excel sheet as well. If you are really energitic, add an excel sheet for customers, orders etc.

    You might start out with 10 products and say, "well that's easy to add to some other database later" but if you are a success and have 2k products in a year or two, do you really just want to spend two weeks reentering all that stuff? It also gives you a backup. I probably wouldn't be to worried about Yahoo going belly up and loosing my database, but I've never heard of the store in the original post. That would worry me.

    excel is probably the most straight forward way of dealing with this, although you need to be careful of certain characters such as quotes or equal signs and the format the excel sheet is saved in. Excel does funny things at times. Other programs may be better if you know them like access. I can't comment on that as I know nothing about MS Access or similar db programs.

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    While i have looked at putting an online store up for a while with my business i think that it is something that i have not really got to just yet. I have tried a few times with different scripts such as cubecart and zencart. However have never got to the point where i am fully happy with what i have produced.

    I had considered trying something like yahoo or paypal cart options, however the initial costs did seem prohibitive compared to what i could do with a script on my own hosting.

    I did once have a chance to play with x-cart, however as you have Kristine found it difficult to work with. While i think that it is probably one of the better options and given the money to invest in it, and getting the modifications done by them, i would probably use it. However i do think that it is much more geared towards paying for modification by the creators then by someone who buys it. I think just to get the add-ons i wanted, it would have been close to $1000 up front, which for me is to higher price to pay for something you may or may not find to be any more successful then an open source equivalent.
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    One of my clients uses osCommerce. It's not the easiest to work with, but the more I do the easier it gets. Her prior developer did a good job customizing it.

    I've also worked with Zen Cart, which is similar to osCommerce as it really is an offshoot of osCommerce. One or more developers left osCommerce to start Zen Cart I think. Seems to be a little easier to work with and customize.

    I want to test some of the shopping cart plugins that have been written for WordPress. I have a feeling they're going to prove to be my choice in a cart. It'll depend on how much the cart plugin scales. It may be something that works great for a few products, but isn't the best when your product list grows into the thousands. I have a hunch it will be able to handle a lot of products, but I need to test.
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    We use Volusion and am very happy with it. We didn't use one of the standard templates but mixed their cart with our design so it's semi-custom I guess. It's very easy to use and has many SEO features built into it. I can add a new product in about 60 seconds which includes SEO for the product. The problem we've had hasn't been with Volusion but more with our webmaster who may soon be replaced.

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