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  • We've spent a lot of time and money on our site (Habitat Aid) which is based on a desktop system, now called Sellerdeck. It has worked ok, but the ongoing costs are excessive. Every time we need to tweak any aspect of the design we have to ask the developer to do it for us. Ker-ching! Also the SEO aspect of the software hasn't been brilliant.

    I think if I was starting from scratch now I would use a cloud based system like Shoppify, which is relatively easy to use and allows you to design something reasonably bespoke. Once a designer has set up the basic design you can then play with it yourself. If your offer is relatively simple you can design it yourself.

  • PRO

    Take a look at Wix...I think they've created a very capable and easy to use website builder

  • thank you for your help so far.

  • PRO

    Does it need to be E-Commerce? I assume you are looking to promote your surfacing business? If so, I can't imagine that you require the ability to sell your products via an online shopping cart as I imagine quotes have to be given bespoke? If you are simply looking to showcase your handy work e.g. portfolio, testamonials etc then a simple system powered by Wordpress or Joomla would be fine and very easy to maintain.

  • scott with the popularity of the surfacing now days,do get enquiries that are uneconomical for us to install and people want to do it them selves.

  • We use sitewizard for our two websites. I have 2 wordpress blogs and a Ning networking site.
    Currently I am having an ecommerce site built by site wizard.
    Our 2 current non ecommerce sites are seriousgardener.co.uk and fenlandironworks.co.uk, I like site wizard, the tech chaps are very good I can update the sites myself and I am confident with them, if you want to talk to them ask to speak to a lady called Jo, I think the surname is Bright. She is a very nice young lady.
    The other site I have set up is a ning site Gardens of Britain it is a free site for garden cantres, public gardens and their visitors to upload their info , video etc onto.

    Hosting costs for ning with the package I have is £170 a year the Sitewizard sites about £12 a month from memory each.

  • thank you everybody for your replies,after looking into the idea more,there seems positives and negatives of having a e shop.on the positive customers will buy without having to phone up to place a order,on the negative side,there is a charge for updating products in your shop or you can spend time updating it yourself.

    Many of the items i could sell from my e shop.others are bespoke and need a discussion about quantities and installation.
    what are peoples thoughts about selling from a website v a eshop or should i combine both.

  • Phil just looked at your site,as there is no way of purchasing them without contacting you,is this why you want a e commerce site.

  • http://www.landscapejuicenetwork.com/forum/topics/does-anyone-have-... morning Peak. You are right at the moment people have to contact us first to order.
    We do not currently take card payments either.
    We had a number of what we found to be obstacles to introducing an on line shop we are working through them slowly and should have at least part of the sales set up working online during the course of this year.
    The problems we have, are transport, card proccessing costs and bank charges. We joined the FSB and have the opportunity of free banking with the Co op and a reasonable (in relative terms) card handling fees with streamline. We dipped our toe in the water with Ebay and Paypal but they were making more money out of the sale than we were, so we carried on with asking people to contact us to place an order. I don't mind talking to people we try and get things right for them, answer their questions and put them at ease.
    Transport is a real problem, particularly with the obelisks, we used to use Nightfreight and things were going on nicely, until a new local manager put a gun to our head and said spend £500 a month with us at least or we don't want your business. We eventually found a local franchise, Fastway that weren't too bad but had issues with the taller obelisks. They unfortunately went bust, we currently use UKmail (Chris Nangle put us on to them) and a local pallet company for bulky heavy valuable items, the obelisks are still a problem carriage wise.
    The fires are not too much of an issue in terms of carriage so we are launching the shop for them first.

    Peak surfacing ltd. said:

    Phil just looked at your site,as there is no way of purchasing them without contacting you,is this why you want a e commerce site.

  • PRO

    To justify a proper E-Commerce site you need to sell enough through it to justify the costs. There are many off the shelf solutions that can cope with the kind of thing you are looking for. Unfortunately most E-Commerce packages are geared towards users who have many products to upload. At this stage I would think a tailored package would be overkill for what you require. However, if you are looking at extending your product range in the future I would go for a solid open source E-Commerce platform like Opencart. This will give the flexibility to expand your product range wihout incurring further costs.

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