Hi all, i am looking to create a website whereby i can sell products online. I do not have much knowledge of how to create a site. i currently own the domain name at present. My questions now are, if i was to setup a website as a source for where i could sell my products on. how much would would the cost on estimate for creating and setting it all up be? Also, talking from someone who has never created a website before, how difficult is the process? and could someone point me in the right direction if i was hoping to learn the process. any feedback is much appreciated.
It depends what you are looking for exactly. If you need a site that has some advanced features that you won't find on a typical ecommerce site, like payments that give you access to certain tools on your website, or payments for support on the website, you might need to have it done custom. This starts at about $2k and goes to infinity. You might also want to consider a custom solution if you want it to look a certain way. There are also services like WooCommerce that are somewhere in the middle. These can be based on templates, but usually people add additional features, some of which might even be hand-coded. Other options are services like Big Commerce. There are monthly subscription services like Volusion though that can make it more affordable. I think you can get an ecommerce site there for ~5-15/mo. However it won't be very customizable, and won't look exactly like how you want it to unless you hire somebody. The lowest option is to just link to an off-site PayPal page. The client can pay there using paypal, and when you get the email you can take care of the order.
I have developed my e-com site (it is in final stages of completion), using just the Wordpress, and woocommerce plugin. Both are free, and woocommerce has some good paid additives as well. Everything about how to install and use it is available on their website aqs well as in Youtube. Go through it and first learn and test it on a dummy site on your hosting, before needing further advanced assistance. I will be trying to also do a localhost e-com copy of my site to test it further... haven't yet started it on localhost (xampp environment) because just recently I had to change the hard disk on my PC, and it got delayed. So try this combo first. Adding PP gateway is also easy. May be you'll be able to begin a small e-com site without spending anything more than a domain name and the linux-based webhosting fees. You may also look for Lynda's WordPress WooCommerce course. I've heard it is a complete course that teaches everything you would like to learn on this topic. If you find (or some other member find) the entire course (freely available of course), then please also let me know about it.
Magento is a free and easy e-commerce shopping cart. I have used Simple Cart for a very small online registration project that used Paypal - customer could pay either through a paypal account or pay via MC/Visa. ZenCart and OsCommerce are popular as well. All of these should be easy to install via your Cpanel.
Thanks guys i appreciate all your responses. i will look into whats been said. just wanted to add i don't want something to flashy to begin with. Just a normal/basic site which could accept payments via paypal to start with. any other input is thankful
If you are just starting then I will recommend you Wordpress + WooCommerce/JigoShop setup Its easy and free.
It really depends on how much you know already. To have a decent ecommerce site made you would probably be looking at $1k upwards. Or you could use a platform such as Bigcommerce of Shopify and do alot of the work yourself and outsource some of the design work.
I would suggest woocommerce that runs on wordpress. Its the way to go these days if you need to create seo friendly sites with content management features.
Magento is a free and easy e-commerce shopping cart. I have used Simple Cart for a very small online registration project that used Paypal - customer could pay either through a paypal account or pay via MC/Visa. ZenCart and OsCommerce are popular as well. All of these should be easy to install via your Cpanel.
