Online shop software..

Gav · 17 Aug 2011 at 09:02

Have any of you guys had any dealings with building online stores? What do you find is the best package to handle it?

I have been looking at this: http://www.bigcommerce.com/

Any thoughts?

Izi · 17 Aug 2011 at 10:59

give it a go, its free to try.

My only problem with these sort of services is how much flexibility you get.

Also, say you outgrow the system or want bespoke functionality, you would probably want to go to a different platform. Find out how easy it is to export products / orders / customers / etc to make sure this route is open at a later point in time.

Gav · 17 Aug 2011 at 11:06

Bigcommerce is designed around their Interspire package. If you do outgrow the hosted version you can purchase the non-hosted version (not cheap) and host your own..

I'm having a play with it at the moment and I am quite impressed with the amount of customisation you can do. The only downside I can see is that it doesnt link directly with sage accounting packages, only quickbooks..

Izi · 17 Aug 2011 at 12:47

How far can you tweak the UI?

Gav · 17 Aug 2011 at 13:03

quite a bit by the looks of things. You have full access to the layout, html and stylesheets and you can upload any custom files that you need.

gord · 17 Aug 2011 at 13:16

We use the non-hosted interspire shopping cart for our store http://store.amttraining.com/uk/. It's done us fairly well for the last 1.5 years. AFAIK the BigCommerce package is pretty good, but I would check out the free options too.

Opencart? http://www.opencart.com

Izi · 17 Aug 2011 at 13:40

gord said:
We use the non-hosted interspire shopping cart for our store http://store.amttraining.com/uk/. It's done us fairly well for the last 1.5 years. AFAIK the BigCommerce package is pretty good, but I would check out the free options too.

Opencart? http://www.opencart.com

Open cart doesn't have as many features, but looks pretty solid. www.nopcommerce.com has more features then Open Cart, but is ASP.NET.

Gav · 17 Aug 2011 at 13:51

The main reason for looking at BigCommerce is it's ability to integrate with Ebay and Facebook.. It's pretty much a necessity these days..

Heres what I have been playing with so far..

http://evolutionvt.mybigcommerce.com/index.php

phil-k · 17 Aug 2011 at 13:57

Gav said:
The main reason for looking at BigCommerce is it's ability to integrate with Ebay and Facebook.. It's pretty much a necessity these days..

Heres what I have been playing with so far..

http://evolutionvt.mybigcommerce.com/index.php

What I am looking for is store software where I can import, exported files from Ebays Turbolister including the pictures. Other sites like Ebid have had their own progs written to import TL files, but I wonder if there is ready written software to do the same

Gav · 17 Aug 2011 at 14:00

if you can export from turbolister to a csv file (or similar) then you can import that into BigCommerce.

You may need to upload the images seperately though as they are hosted on ebays servers..

Izi · 17 Aug 2011 at 15:22

If you google Ecommerce Solution by BigCommerce you can see some websites created by the system.

They look fairly amateurish, but then you do get what you pay for.

Gav · 17 Aug 2011 at 16:03

Izi said:
If you google Ecommerce Solution by BigCommerce you can see some websites created by the system.

They look fairly amateurish, but then you do get what you pay for.

Thats down to the person building the site.. not the software :-)

Have a look at cubecart etc... some of the sites built using that software are exactly the same..

blade007 · 17 Aug 2011 at 17:02

You can get CS-Cart on a free download (with some limited functionality) but enough to get you going and you can increase the licence if your shop grows.

phil-k · 17 Aug 2011 at 17:21

Gav said:
if you can export from turbolister to a csv file (or similar) then you can import that into BigCommerce.

You may need to upload the images seperately though as they are hosted on ebays servers..

I would want to export and upload TL files that are on my pc not from Ebay complete with pictures.
I did have a look at a spreadsheet exported into Ebids upload prog, but TL gives a lot of the pictures the same file number, just putting them in lots of sub directories.
I could upload all the picture folders to a web site but its not ideal.
I suppose I would have to have a site and upload software built especially and I bet that would cost a few grand

Gav · 18 Aug 2011 at 00:40

phil-k said:
I would want to export and upload TL files that are on my pc not from Ebay complete with pictures.
I did have a look at a spreadsheet exported into Ebids upload prog, but TL gives a lot of the pictures the same file number, just putting them in lots of sub directories.
I could upload all the picture folders to a web site but its not ideal.
I suppose I would have to have a site and upload software built especially and I bet that would cost a few grand

you can export your listings from TL into a CSV file : http://pages.ebay.com/turbo_lister/csv.html

You can then import the csv file into BigCommerce: https://support.bigcommerce.com/questions/718/How+do+I+import+images+when+importing+products?