Online shop questions

[Ferre]

One of my neighbours asked me to help him with a website for a new business he wants to set up. It needs to be an online shop, he already bought a domain name and we got him hosting today and I've set up his dns to point to his new host+domain.

As a dns change takes a little time to resolve anyway I decided to ask you guys for some help in the main time because I have no experience whatsoever with e-shop software. For example, what to install? I have set him up with a cPanel hosting including fantastico so I can easily install one of the e-shop softwares from there, but which one?

Furthermore, he'll need someone to add some custom design to the template for low-budget ($200-250), I'll be happy to receive some advice to that one too.

[Muddy]

How big will his site be? Hundreds of pages? If it's just a few pages it would be best to keep it as a static site just using HTML. If it's big, he'll probably want to make it dynamic.

For a shopping cart, I personally use http://www.cart32.com. Have for years and they have great products, good prices and superb customer service.

[Ferre]

It's only a handful of products but I do need a shopping cart system because of the back end, my neighbour is computer illiterate and needs an easy-peazy way to just log in and add or remove a product.

In fact, I'm going to install one of the e-commerce software's from fantastico in Cpanel to make future upgrades also easy for him, I just want to know which of the ones in cPanel's fantastico is the most user friendly.

[pctec]

I use paypal only... the fees are reasonable(compared to a merchant account)... Sorry but I have no experience in anything else...

[Big Dan]

I use paypal only... the fees are reasonable(compared to a merchant account)... Sorry but I have no experience in anything else...

That's what I was going to suggest. Push all the payment stuff over to PayPal this way you or your comp-illiterate neighbor doesn't have to worry about the security of credit card information.

Most people don't realize this but you don't have to have a PayPal account to pay with PayPal.

I haven't worked on enough e-commerce sites to really know everything and give you good suggestions but I would think unless he's planning on doing a high volume of sales Paypal would be cheaper then getting an SSL certificate and going with a dedicated payment processor.

That being said: Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.org), the blogging software has some nice shopping cart plugins. Couple a good cart plugin with a nice theme and I think you'll be good to go. WP will be dead simple for him to add/edit items on his own. Pushing payment processing off to PayPal or even Google Checkout solves the security worries.

[Ferre]

Thanks, only Paypal it is then. I'll have a look at those wordpress plugins too.

[Muddy]

I have a merchant account and accept all cards but also use Paypal. That's no doubt the easiest way to go.

[Ferre]

Isn't a shopping cart software a better solution that wordpress? I can install CubeCart, OS Commerce or Zen Cart via fantastico.

Doesn't that look more business-like than wordpress?

[Big Dan]

Probably so, Ferre. My thing is I don't know how user friendly those are on the backend. WP is really dead simple and it's layout is controlled by themes some of which make it look just like a regular old shopping cart.


Here's a bunch of cart themes, some free some paid: Wordpress Ecommerce Plugins (http://storecrowd.com/blog/wordpress-ecommerce/)