E-commerce website help

C

Cicero

Expert Member
Joined
Jul 20, 2010
Messages
2,286
Reaction score
14
Location
Coastal
I'm looking into helping my brother in law starting an e-commerce website, selling PC's and stuff (I know its a difficult market, but that's besides the point) and expanding into other avenues later.

  1. Whats the best/easiest way to getting an e-commerce website done?
  2. What would you guys estimate it would cost? With credit card payment.
  3. Timelines for development, realistic (I'm an engineer, I know how long dev takes, and I often underestimate myself :p)
We wanna do this properly, so I'm not keen on the whole free e-commerce template thing. Just seems too generic, unless I'm just being stupid.

What do you guys think? Feel free to pitch your own companies and quotes etc.
 
you have various ways of doing this, personally i would use magento or cre loaded. oscommerce, zen cart etc is ok but meh.

for credit card processing you need a merchant account from your bank and a processor like vcs, mygate etc.

there are ones out there for smaller guys where you don't need your merchant account.

what i would do, setup magento, buy a premium theme and mod it (unless you are good enough to design your own themes)
 
Easiest way is to use an existing CMS system. D3x! had some good suggestions and I would add Virtuemart with Joomla. You can have a custom Joomla template designed if you are looking for something different.

On the credit card side, D3x! was spot on and the merchant accounts are relatively expensive in terms of base banking fees per month. In addition they take about 5% of sales.
There are other with no monthly fees with companies like Moneybookers or MonsterPay which we use successfully with our clients and Virtuemart. The problem is that the amount sits in dollars and there are conversion transaction costs. It all amounts to about 5% at the end of the day, which is the same as having a merchant account. With these you bring in a bit of currency risk into the business.

Typical development times for the online store with Joomla and Virtuemart is about 8 hours, based on our experience. Add more time for adding the individual products. Once the structure is in place, the rest is easy.
The development time depends on the CMS system and the proficiency of coding.
 
i have done a few stores so i know ;)

frankly if it is a start up i would focus more on having a decent site with good info and great support, i have even started online stores that began with only EFT's as the payment option and they eventually grew.

and yes a site can go up quick quick
 
Joomla (Content Management System) - FREE
Virtuemart (For Joomla) - FREE
Joomla Template (http://www.joomla24.com) - FREE
Payfast (EFT & Credit Card Processing) - FREE setup - only pay small amount on EFT's and small percentage on Credit Cards.

Simple and works for me!
 
Ok, so from what I see here, is that I was being stupid, and the free stuff (Joomla, Virtuemart etc) is actually the way to go, but I obviously need to customise it, and add the payment gateway.

OK, I'll try get something going myself first with a sample site and report back here sometime soon for your constructive feedback :)

If I dont come right, because I have no skills in webdev, what would this cost to get a company to do it for me?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X