ecommerce for the faint-hearted

nickgarnett — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:30:36 +0000

E-commerce is no longer the swamp of impenetrable code it used to be, it scared us all for many years forcing us to either not sell things on the web (by us I mean small businesses) or resort to crude alternatives like sending cheques and PayPal’s own ‘buy now’ buttons (these work well if you only have a few products).
Developments in the last few years have enabled both new eCommerce channels like Etsy, Ebay and Shopify and eCommerce plugins (by plugin I mean a pre-packed piece of software that just plugs in and works) like WP-eCommerce and MarketPress to open up the eCommerce market to less tech savvy users. These developments have enabled the small business/sole trader to finally tap into the enormous sales potential of eCommerce and sell their products to worldwide markets.
A lot of these new opportunities are directly tied to two significant developments of the last five years – The increasing marketplace penetration of WordPress, a very easy to use Content Management System (CMS) and third party shopfronts like Shopify.
Wordpress is the most used CMS (over 50 million installs) and can be accessed either at wordpress.com (a hosted solution), or at wordpress.org where you download a copy to host yourself (see the famous 5 minute install video), this is the version we’re going to talk about.
Wordpress works with 3rd party themes (free and commercial), which enable the ‘look and feel’ of a website, and 3rd party plugins (free and commercial), which enable the functionality, and wordpress has a couple of really user friendly eCommerce plugins that will get you up and running in no time:
I’ve assumed you have WordPress website already, if you don’t see the install video link above.
MarketPress from WPMUdev has a FREE lite version and a paid version at $39 (cheap). You simply download the plugin zip file, go to your add plugins screen and upload and activate, it’s that simple. The paid version has a lot of extra functionality including coupons, which are one of the greatest sales aids ever and fantastic for loyalty incentives or new product launches, extra themes and digital download sales. I think it’s well priced and you can use it on as many sites as you like. It’s also great looking out of the box.Tthe curse of eCommerce was always how awful it looked on the page.
Our other favourite is WooCommerce from Woo themes, one of the WordPress communities largest premium theme businesses. WooCommerce is brand new but has already carved itself a bit of a niche with it’s simplicity, good looks and price, it’s FREE. You install the same way as MarketPress and all you have to do is buy a theme (you get one free called Wootique) from woothemes, these cost $70, which may seem on the high side but Woo have one of the best support systems out there; I’ve used them for many clients and they’ve never failed to find me a solution. WooCommerce comes with very good functionality like shipping, coupons, reporting and basic PayPal functionality, you can buy plugins for other payment gateways you may want, for example if you have a merchant account you may want to use a paid for Authorize.net gateway.
I’ve worked with a lot of e-commerce scripts like Virtuemart and Zencart but one of the real advantages of these two themes (they’re not the only two) is that the buying pages don’t look like they’ve shot from a shotgun, I’m sure you’ve seen the same horrible online shops I have. These new providers deliver an incredibly rich and aesthetically pleasing experience for customers without you having to know any coding whatsoever.
If you want a similiar experience without having to build a website or have hosting you can look at Shopify. Shopify is a hosted solution and you can just access the resources you need on the shopify site. There’s a good 30 day free trial and costs start at $29 a month and go up to $179 for really big stuff, and believe me there are some really big sites that use Shopify like Madsen and one of my favourites Tatt.ly. Functionality is as comprehensive as a self hosted solution with free and paid for themes, 100’s of plugin’s to enhance user experience and a very sophisticated backend with good product management and reporting. It is very, very simple to operate and I would recommend Shopify to anyone. It may seem on the expensive side but if you add up hosting, your time, little bits of development here and there I think the costs are comparable to a self hosted eCommerce solution.
Before we conclude I just want to mention Two market style eCommerce solutions including ebay. We generally think of ebay as an auction site for second hand goods, not any more, what ebay has become is a shopfront for many thousands of businesses selling new and nearly new products, it’s used by HP, Nikon, Kodak and many, many more international manufacturers to sell returns and/or new products. It’s simple to start and run a shop and you have a ready market for saleable products, but it is more expensive than you think with final sales fees of 10% for small operators plus 2.5% to PayPal. I’ll also mention Etsy, the darling of the artist/artisan market. If you make things Etsy is a marketplace specifically designed for you. Jewellery, pottery, glass, you name a craft and it’s represented on Etsy. With millions of visitors all over the world it’s a fabulous outlet for crafts people. Costs are about 4% excluding shipping which seems very reasonable.
Let me conclude by saying that e-commerce is now accessible to everyone no matter how much of a luddite you are, developments have given everyone a chance to take advantage of this exciting sales channel and you no longer have to have a degree in Computer Science to sell on the web. There are outlets and solutions to suit everyone from the small artisan to the electronic download sellers, all of which are now simple and inexpensive. So sell,sell,sell.

In France

nmgarnett — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:18:11 +0000

We’ve recently put together a really nice looking site for a French burglar alarm company featuring a simple e-commerce plugin. We think it’s the sharpest burglar alarm site we’ve ever seen? what about you?

New site for Nicky Slater

nmgarnett — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:50:27 +0000

We’ve just built a new site/blog for ‘Dancing on Ice’ star, Nick Slater. Nicky is taking a year off to work on various projects and wanted a platform to document the work he’s doing. Built with WordPress, we put the structure together and host the site. Nicky’s new site is at http://www.nickyslater.com.

International sheet music sales

nmgarnett — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:13:16 +0000

http://julianmusic.co.uk is built with Joomla and the venerable Virtuemart e-commerce component, not everyone’s taste, but very reliable once you understand how it works. Site took about 3 weeks to put together and includes over 150 electronic PDF products and MP3 snippets for ‘listening before buying’.

Built in a day (or less)

nmgarnett — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:07:09 +0000

Yes we built it in a day, in fact we built the structure including pages and navigation, pictures in a morning. The remaining time was spent designing the logo and choosing plugins. The site is built with WordPress and this site Morley Farm Barn perfectly illustrates both the speed and cost effectiveness of WordPress.

New project

nmgarnett — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:31:17 +0000

We’re just wrapping up a big project at http://propertyfrancais.com. The site lists French property for sale or rental and is built with Joomla and a component called EZRealty for the listing functionality. We’ve also done a lot of bespoke work including the front page search functionality, the clickable search map and an XML feed importer that allows 1000′s of properties to be uploaded, categorised and published quickly.