Basic Online Shop Options

Soldato
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28 Apr 2011
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Barnet, London
Hi all,

So, I have a basic understanding of HTML, PHP and a few other bits and pieces. I (we) have literally two or three items/products I would like to sell online and I'm wondering what the most effective way of doing this is?

I realise the easiest way is eBay, but I (we) would like our own site for doing this. I could reasonably easily patch together a simple site, how easy is it to integrate Google or Apple Pay?

Would it make more sense to use something like Wix? How about Wordpress as an in between of ready made and make it yourself?

Thanks.
 
Soldato
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Sufferlandria
It's quite easy to do and you wouldn't need to do and coding yourself.
Either Wix/Squarespace or WordPress with the Woocommerce plugin. Either way you just click on what options you want, you don't need to know any HTML or PHP.
 
Soldato
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I'm not sure how Wix or Squarespace work and if they charge fees on sales.
WordPress + WooCommerce itself is free to use but the payment gateway you choose (PayPal, Stripe, etc) will charge transaction fees.
 
Soldato
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I host - and have helped setup - a decent amount of e-commerce sites through day-job and my own company so here's a bit of advice based on both sides of the fence:

If you're starting fresh and comfortable to spend *some* time then WordPress + WooCommerce will be your best bet and cost the least. It's incredibly flexible and there's a plugin for everything you could think of. You could be up and running within 2 hours of getting it installed.

Whilst Wix and SquareSpace definitely have their places, WP + WC allows you to have greater control over your site and costs in future.
There's nothing to stop Wix/SquareSpace from hiking prices up and there's no migration path away from them other than a full rebuild so you'd have no choice to suck it up or start fresh.

Going with WP + WC also allows you to easily and quickly migrate to a new hosting provider should you ever need to scale up, but don't fall into the trap of listening to advice from somebody telling you that you need a VPS or Dedicated server, very rarely is that the case and is often thrown out there as a solution to being on a poor shared hosting provider or having too many WordPress plugins..

Shared hosting on a solid platform can far outperform a hashed together VPS template with the same resources available (long winded but I can explain further if needed). You'll want a 2 CPU + 2GB RAM allocation (often referred to as LVE limits) so that'll see you around £5-10/month depending who you opt for. i.e. Krystal Ruby or Stablepoint Medium plans.

With that said, Wix + SquareSpace are perfect for set and forget and easily used by all scales of technical knowledge.
With WordPress there is a little more hands-on, i.e. ensuring your installation and plugins are up-to-date (there are auto-updates at least).

Alternatively, there's always PrestaShop as a more e-commerce targeted self-hosted solution but probably steeper learning curve.
 
Soldato
OP
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28 Apr 2011
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14,761
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Barnet, London
Thanks, some good info. I've not yet started, but my current plan is to try and setup WP and WC on a subdomain of a site I already have, for some playing and testing, then getting specific hosting sorted when everything is good to go :)
 

Dup

Dup

Soldato
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10 Mar 2006
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East Lancs
There's no point knocking together a resource heavy CMS for a couple of products. Just use PHP and JS to knock together a simple site. The payment gateway is the biggest concern as they will take a cut so I would start there to see if it's worth it to you. It's been a while since I touched one but Stripe is fairly simple, well documented and supports Google & Apple pay.

If you only expect one purchase at once and shipping fees are static then there's no need for a cart and that simplifies things even further.
 
Soldato
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How does Shopify compare to Wix/square space?

Shopify is the by far the best out of the box e-commerce platform and the pricing isn't bad either, starts around £25/month with very competitive transaction rates.

Many retailers are moving away from their own heavily-invested Magento environments and onto Shopify and rightly so when you compare the cost of both.
But again the obvious issues with that is you're at the mercy of Shopifys pricing should they dramatically increase one day and it's somebody else's platform to go wrong.
 
Permabanned
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It really depends how far you want to go in terms of plugins and design and who will be maintaining it e.t.c.

An out of the box e-commerce isn't too badly priced especially Shopify. With wordpress it's not really set up out the box and you need to do a lot of work to get it right.

There's no point knocking together a resource heavy CMS for a couple of products. Just use PHP and JS to knock together a simple site. The payment gateway is the biggest concern as they will take a cut so I would start there to see if it's worth it to you. It's been a while since I touched one but Stripe is fairly simple, well documented and supports Google & Apple pay.

If you only expect one purchase at once and shipping fees are static then there's no need for a cart and that simplifies things even further.

This isn't easy at all unless you know how to code. Not compared to something already out the box unless the op wants to pay for someone to do it for them.
 
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