opening e-store

tooslim

tooslim

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hey i wanted to open a store online to sell clothes. but not cheap clothes... nice clothes.

so my question is how do i start. i know a bit on how to design websites in photoshop and stuff but i dont know how to set up like payment stuff ya know?
so i was wandering if you guys could give me some pointers and hopefully shoot me in the right direction
thanks
 
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Where are you sourcing the clothes? Are they your own or from a dropshipper etc? If you selling clothes on behalf of an online store they would usually have some templates and assistance in that area.
 
well i was going to contact the companies directly and order bulk.

i also work part time at a t-shirt screen printing shop so i thought it would be a good way to market shirts i design too
 
Try something like shopping cart which also help with the store design. Just google it.

Haven't used myself so maybe somebody else will have better alternatives but it can give you an idea of what you're looking for
 
ok ill look into it. but thanks for your response.
 
Plimus offers a fee shopping cart, and I think there are some others too. But you will have to pay for the good ones.
 
Interspire shopping cart is pretty decent, I use it for a few of my e-stores - everything is browser based & it's simple to use.
 
Best one i have ever used is os commerce. You can get it free i think from their site, and sometimes web hosts offer it as an installation on their cpanel
 
depends strongly on what you want to do. you can't just say "use oscommerce and that's it". if you want to build a professional webshop and live from it someday you should think more complex from the beginning.... if you make mistakes in the beginning you can have big - and expensive - problems later... (trust me i know what i'm talking about...)

1) go to a professional / experienced web-designer and get a layout. not a oldschool-webdesigner, but one that knows about stuff like web-usability/split-testing/...

2) shop software. most will say go for os/xt-commerce or magento. i'd never use those tools for a professional shop (i'm much to afraid of exploits/securityholes/... to use it. if the shop client data go into the wrong hands i'd be really fucked). it's a good low-cost start maybe - but if you scale quickly you have to think about moving to something different - and there we maybe have a data migration problem... so choose wisely (one of the reasons why we delevoped our own shop software for our clients. you're much more flexible there... oh and try to organize 300.000 articles in open source software).

3) ERP software... this is also very important... there are hundreds out there. the software should have connectors for importing/exporting all data (esp. clients/orders) and features for organizing your business. take a look at eg. "microsoft dynamics NAV" (at least the website) to get an idea

4) marketing... the expensive part... online/offline marketing... this will cost the most money...

if you have any specific questions just ask me. i built up several shops for clients so maybe i can give you some infos
 
Oscommerce is good and Free, but you should know some basic coding and maintenance.
There are paid options like Yahoo, but they charge money. The good thing is that anyone with no coding kowledge can open a store with their solutions...
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/
 
wagooza said:
Oscommerce is good and Free, but you should know some basic coding and maintenance.
There are paid options like Yahoo, but they charge money. The good thing is that anyone with no coding kowledge can open a store with their solutions...
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/
Click to expand...

Os commerce have addons that come with tutorials for things that need to be modified. I opened an online shop with this, but never really got it running. Its so damn simple to use a 2 yr old would have success with it.
 
thanks a lot guys. im going to reserach some more but i like wat mike has to say . thanks ill be pm u mike soon with questions
 
macmastermike said:
depends strongly on what you want to do. you can't just say "use oscommerce and that's it". if you want to build a professional webshop and live from it someday you should think more complex from the beginning.... if you make mistakes in the beginning you can have big - and expensive - problems later... (trust me i know what i'm talking about...)

1) go to a professional / experienced web-designer and get a layout. not a oldschool-webdesigner, but one that knows about stuff like web-usability/split-testing/...

2) shop software. most will say go for os/xt-commerce or magento. i'd never use those tools for a professional shop (i'm much to afraid of exploits/securityholes/... to use it. if the shop client data go into the wrong hands i'd be really fucked). it's a good low-cost start maybe - but if you scale quickly you have to think about moving to something different - and there we maybe have a data migration problem... so choose wisely (one of the reasons why we delevoped our own shop software for our clients. you're much more flexible there... oh and try to organize 300.000 articles in open source software).

3) ERP software... this is also very important... there are hundreds out there. the software should have connectors for importing/exporting all data (esp. clients/orders) and features for organizing your business. take a look at eg. "microsoft dynamics NAV" (at least the website) to get an idea

4) marketing... the expensive part... online/offline marketing... this will cost the most money...

if you have any specific questions just ask me. i built up several shops for clients so maybe i can give you some infos
Click to expand...

Seems you know what you are doing. My brother and I are toying with a dropship site just to get aquainted with what we must do to sucessfuly run a online business. He recently graduated high school with a masters of technology in computers and is rather good at the SEO thing or at least it would seem. our problem is we are still learning the site creation parts and have deciced to save time to use some open source software to develope the site.
It is up and running with a few kinks here and there but for some reason the pages load slow as hell. If it were not my site I would never stick around to see the page load befor I moved on to the next site. can you offer any sugestions? We are working on a shoestring budget for now and hope to be able to pay some one to aid in the development of our next site if this one can make us a little working capital. http://www.adamsgadgets.com have a look.
I am a total noob to the comerce stuff so any sugestions will be much appreciated.
 
Without knowing specifically what your skill level is, what your budget is, or 48 other factors, its hard to answer your question. MacMasterMike's answer seems to offer the most. The only thing I would add is that if you don't have much technical skill, an off the shelf product/solution like www.Volusion.com is actually pretty robust solution but you will have to pay a monthly fee.
 
hi treeman

i've posted some tips about loading-optimization some weeks ago. here's the link:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/38238-load-images-faster.html#post364036

but i think your problem is a slow database or querys that perform bad. what database are you using? mysql? in almost any database you have tools to find slow querys (for mysql you can download the tools for free on their website). try to find and optimize the slow querys first. then optimize your database-settings. try to increase cache-size so the queryresults that are called often are stored in ram. there's a nice script out there for mysql that does that job pretty good. it's called mysqltuner and it's free: wiki.mysqltuner.com/MySQLTuner

also read into indexing tables and how to optimize querys for great performance. there are some good books out there. maybe you also should join a developers forum and ask your program/database specific questions there.

then you maybe should use a template-engine. "smarty" does a good job. there's caching built in so when the site is rendered one time the next pageloads are really fast.

what server do you have? are you using VPS? or shared hosting? maybe there are too many users hosted on that server or the hardware is quite old... try moving to a new server then (quality-hosting costs some money. but it's worth it.)

for great php-performance increases also install eaccelerator.net - it's a php extension that precompiles and caches your apps. installation is pretty simple and that's it. on my projects this always gave a huge speedincrease
 
Hey macmastermike, I'm the brother. Thanks for the pointers. I had tried a handful of things you mentioned already without much result unfortunately. I managed to shave off a few seconds here and there, but 10 seconds is still too long a wait. We're using a shopcart extension for joomla called Virtuemart. I used mysql for the shop DB knowing it to be free and familiar.

You're right about it being a database issue. The only slow loading pages are product listings. Originally we had 20 products per page and it loaded in about 20 secs. I hacked the script to display 10 instead, and low and behold it loaded half as slow. It looks like the browser waits until all the product data is loaded and then displays it, instead of displaying everything as it loads.

To reinforce... I know it can't be a prob with the hosting. We're on a quality VPS that's had success with my other mysql-intense sites. I optimized the shop's tables with MySQL Administrator, a GUI tool found on mysql's official site, but I haven't been able to track down specific slow loading queries. MySQL Administrator conveniently grays out all the query log tabs including one called Slow Query Log. :Eyecrazy:

I checked out MySQLTuner and discovered it's a perl script ready for Unix based systems but not so much Windows Server. I'll have to keep looking for Windows tools or maybe somebody here can point me in the right direction. Meanwhile I'll take a gander at smarty and eaccellerator. Thanks again mac.
 
Hey,

Dude i say you should just start off with a simple site with all your products and then you can list them on an auction site, once you get recognition and some good feedback then that is when you would want to start processing all the money yourself, cos most users are reluctant to buy from a new site.

Many of the guys here may think differently but thats my opinion!
 
no problem. if you have any other questions just let me know. maybe i can help you
 
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