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Hi Guys, I'm building an online store for a natural cosmetics company. What store would you recomend ( It has to be atractive and flexible) I tried citymax.com - but they are not a good choice...
SurfPark
10-09-2006, 08:52 PM
It depends on how much your client wants taken care of. Does the company have a credit card gateway? If not, that means they're going to have to deal directly with Visa (http://www.usa.visa.com/business/accepting_visa/index.html?it=c%7C%2Fbusiness%2Findex%2Ehtml%7CMer chants%20Accepting%20Visa)/Mastercard (http://www.mastercard.com/us/business/en/welcome.html) to obtain one. You could also use PayPal (http://www.paypal.com/) to handle credit cards. These solutions also need a store script on the web site to manage inventory catalogues and store credit card numbers. Assuming that the client is a pre-existing business means they might already have a way to handle credit cards.
If the want an all-in-one solution, I'd suggest Yahoo Merchant Solutions (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/). They handle the credit card side, but take a comission on sales. I think this is similar to what CityMax offers, but I don't know how they compare against each other.
Before I'd even search for a specific service, I'd start asking the client a few questions...
- What's the profit per average sale transaction or your retail sales?
- How many products do you sell? (You'll have to manually enter them all!)
After you ask, start pricing a few solutions. Sometimes the all-in-one stores are worth it, sometimes not. Good luck.
Thanks for your response. Well the client is rather small at this point she has 30-50 products. She uses citymax.com, but I find it hard to make it look the way I want it. Actually this is my first time with online store. I just need to make it beautiful, and she will add products to it. With citymax.com it's hard because it forces you to follow their settings...
Rocketpig
10-09-2006, 09:25 PM
I would go one of two routes:
Hostway.com's built-in store feature uses a version of OSCommerce, a highly customizable program and since it's built-in through Hostway, handling credit cards, securing the site and whatnot is a snap.
If you want complete customization (and secure the site through your host), ZenCart is cool.