E-commerce, best/cheapest way?

[SuperAntMD]

Hi,

I have designed a website to showcase a few simple products (uniforms mostly). Now the original plan was to simply use it for information sake and have people use email or telephone for orders.

I now have decided I want to have an online shop as well. The whole business is a side venture really so I need it to be cheap and manageable.

I used Yola (www.yola.com) to make the website and I think it came out pretty well, the question I have now is how to integrate the Shopping Cart as cost effectively as possible?

I have been playing around on ecwid (www.ecwid.com) and again I think I can produce something pretty good- the problem I have is that I need a payment partner and a Merchant bank account.

Virtual Card systems (www.vcs.co.za) seem to offer a good service and decent price but the banks want to take a huge chunk of my cash.


I came across MonsterPay who might be what I need but they dont seem to have enough customisation for me to use their cart system. I need it to be pretty much drag and drop like ecwid, but with lots of options.

What are my options if any? What would you guys recommend? anyone have a similar setup in place?

 

[SilverNodashi]

You want the best, and cheapest way to accomplish this? Pick one. If you need the best, then be prepared to spend some cash, or time on this. Do you want to save R5 per transaction, or make your clients feel that you are a professional and their credit card details and money is safe on the internet? a Cheap solution will give you "cheap clients" as well.

Rather do it properly and gain your clients trust

Would you spend R15K on a new camera from someone like Kalahari.net is it looked like a 15year old put it together? I'm not saying your 15years old, b.t.w - but some of your clients may thinks so.

ecwid looks "nice", but it doesn't seem like it's aimed at our local market (i.e. payment gateways and shipping companies) so if you do want to use it for the South African market then you'll either need to use VCS, develop your own modules for South African payment gateways - if you know how, or pay someone todo it if you don't want to use VCS.

If ecwid can take custom payment gateways via some HTML coding then you could probably use something like Monsterpay or PayFast or something "cheap".

VCS IMO is one of the more affordable options around for South African e-commerce websites. Look @ iVeri - NedBank's e-commerce payment gateway and see what some of the other e-commerce sites need to fork out to use it Quite a few of our clients use iVeri, purely cause they already have a NedBank merchant account.
To get a Standard Bank of FND Merchant account, if you bank with them, is not the easiest thing in the world. I don't know about ABSA or Capitec though.

 

[SuperAntMD]

Thanks for the feedback. I hear where you are coming from but so far my design looks quite sleek I think, I have kept it simple and hopefully less is more in this case.

Because I only intend to sell 2 products (with variations in size and colour), ecwid allows me to design a very slick and well integrated Store section. Not sure I would use it for lots of different products but for the two I intend on selling it should do nicely.

R5-R10 per transaction is very much acceptable. Product pricing will be around the R200 mark, but some of those bank accounts cost R500-R600 a month as a minimum commision. I doubt I would be making 100 online sales a month to reach that figure otherwise. VCS are very reasonable I think but I was hoping for a cheaper angle on the bank account really. I know it is a long-shot but thought I would ask here because people on these forums do this sort of thing all the time.

The online aspect is secondary I expect the bulk of sales to be in the real world and so wanted to avoid the high overhead costs these accounts seem to entail.

 

[SilverNodashi]

If you only want to sell 2 items then the cheapest route would be not to use a shopping card, but rather use someone like MyGate / PayFast / VCS's, "Buy now" buttons.
Look here: http://www.payfast.co.za/c/std/pay-now-buttons


There's no need for a whole shopping cart just for 2 items
You could also then just add the same content you would on a shopping cart related to "shipping", "returns / refunds", etc if you need to