E-commerce Hosting Recomendation
 

Any recomendations for e-commerce hosting companies with shopping cart/site templates? I've been out of the game for 15 years. It's for my sister so nothing extravagant/expensive. Needs to be able to support paypal and cc processing.

The two I recommend are BigCommerce and Shopify. Based on the sophistication of the API and backend, I prefer BigCommerce.

You have two choices.

A hosted solution where you pay a monthly price based on the number of items in the catalog or roll your own.

Each have their pros and cons.

Hosted equals more money upfront / monthly out of pocket for the benefit of having a turn key solution and not be bothered with security, upgrades, maintenance etc.....

Roll your own means you are your own IT, for CC processing will need a merchant account and gateway provider. Depending on your choices you could expose yourself to financial responsibility should something go south.

End of day hosted vs roll your own will come out at roughly the same cost over time.

If she has just a few items and wants a professional, secure, hassle free way to sell then go hosted.

Look at Amazon, Shopify, Volusion

Thanks for the info. I heard that amazon takes a large cut of your sells - like 30%! Is that correct? Bigcommerce looks really good. They charge 1.5%. I had my own online store in the 90's with cc processing. The hosting company,best internet, didn't charge per transaction but looks like the hosting model has changed. Since this is for my sister we are definately going the hosting route. I dont have time to be tech support. I'll get it up and running for her though.

Any other hosting recomendations?

If you jump up to $80/mo then there are no transaction fees. I would take BigCommerce (and others) for a free trial spin and see which you prefer as far as the backend goes. This tends to be what matters to people and drives them to these services, as opposed to price.

Of course, when you can replace their $25k web-site with a $25/mo site having more functionality, people do get pretty excited. :)

This is important. You want to find out sooner than later whether the solution works for you.

Unlike self hosted it's not always a simple thing to move providers.

Take advantage of the opportunity for due diligence.

As far as Amazon goes, the percentage they take varies with the category. However, the decision on who to use for fulfillment is a separate one from who to use for a storefront. If you are going to automate fulfillment, I do recommend Amazon. Their price might not be the best, but I think their product is pretty tough to beat.

If you get to the point where Amazon wants to buy your product wholesale and sell it themselves, my experience is that they are pretty tough to work with. I would recommend selling your product on their site yourself, instead.

I wrote the Python modules (as part of the Boto library) for Amazon's Flexible Payment Service and Marketplace Web Services, so I'm a little biased. :)

I like squarespace

Build a Website - Squarespace

Thanks for the recommendations. I sat with my sister last night and helped her create trial sites at shopify and bigcommerce and I agree that bigcommerce back-end is better than shopify. I sent her the volusion and squaresace info this morning so she can try those on her own now that she is more comfortable with the process. I looked at squarespace this morning and that also looks like a really nice product/service. If the backend is as nice as bigcommerce it will move to the top of my list. ;-)

Any of you have experience with or knowledge of Etsy? I hadn't heard of it until my brother-in-law mentioned it last night. I poked around a little and was not impressed.

I've used squarespace for a simple shop and it's not hard to set up at all. Plus if she intends to sell anything face to face she ca card swipe in person.

My experience is dated and relatively insignificant, but I think of Etsy as a marketplace founded by and for disgruntled eBay users. It always struck me as a reactionary product based on nearly religious levels of hatred for eBay and PayPal. I'd love to be wrong about that, though, and I look forward to hearing from others with more recent experience.

Of course, I've bought and sold several million bucks worth of stuff on eBay, and I'm a longtime eBay/PayPal developer who earns income from the site. So I'm pretty biased, and you should take all this with a grain of salt. ;)