Ecommerce Advice - Store building options

Your Ecommerce store building options

Using shop building software.

Choosing to build your web site with an off the shelf store package such as shop factory, EROL or actinic can be the easiest way to get started as the software takes care of all the issues, such as design, tax and shipping calculations and so on. All you have to do is install the software on your PC, enter your product and shop information, delivery costs and upload it all to your chosen Web Hosting company.

All these PC based software packages do have much higher "initial" costs but once you have purchased the software you will find that regular upgrades are provided by the manufacturers as long as you have an active support agreement should anything go wrong.

Using PC based shop building software does have its drawbacks such as high initial setup costs, expensive software upgrades and various limitations on how your web site works. Not to mention the fact that "typically" only 1 person can use your PC at a time so growth is somewhat limited if you need more people to manage your web site and getting support requires access to your PC. Keep in mind what would also happen if your PC blew up or was stolen and you didnt maintain regular daily backups.

Building your store directly on the internet. (Shop builders)

Some service providers allow you to build your shop directly on their system via the Internet.

This method of shop building is considerably cheaper than PC based software and has the advantage of not storing your valuable data on just 1 PC and can be far quicker to get up and running but if you become unhappy with the providers service, all the work spent on the shop is lost, as you can't take it with you.

If you want to build your shop using such a service, at the very least make sure you can point your own Internet address (Domain name) to this shop. You will spend a lot of effort promoting your shop address, so if it is owned by someone else, they effectively control your shop, and your business.

You should also do extensive research on whichever companies you have in mind and line up a host of questions to put to them so that you can compare response times, and how detailed their replies are, giving you a reasonable indication of their own product knowledge.

Paying a professional to build or provide a store for you.

Paying a professional to setup or provide a suitable store for you does not have to be expensive, and in most cases you can actually save an awful lot of money by seeking the experience of a professional.

With ever better software on the market such as X-Cart Shopping cart software, you can have an extremely functional store online within a matter of hours for less than the cost of traditional shop building software.

You can then control your expense's and set a budget on having your store design customised to suit your needs, but paying a professional to customise your shopping cart software will obviously come at a price, often a more than ready-to-go shop software, but it does mean you retain full control over every aspect of everything, and can change just about anything you want to.

A web based "owned" store system like X-Cart can easily be transferred to a new hosting company if need be because you will own all of your web site files and licence, along with your domain name, so no work will ever be put at risk by switching hosting suppliers, and you can easily obtain support for your X-Cart product 24 hours a day.

Another benefit is that as your company or store grows, you can assign as many people to administer your web site as you wish, without limitations or extra licence costs, allowing you to make as many additions or adjustments to your web site as you wish, anytime, without further interaction from your developer.

Creating your own ecommerce solution or shopping cart.

This requires a strong knowledge in writing your own HTML/PHP/MySQL computer code, knowledge in CGI programming and Java Script or Java or PHP, depending on what you want it to do. This is obviously not the easiest way. These days even professional web page developers sometimes use special software for the purpose.

The downside to this is that you will have fairly limited control over the design, layout and style of your store if your knowledge or time to learn all the important things to build your store are not up-to-scratch. Plus of course if you run into problems, will you have the experience or expertise to fix bugs or errors if your code goes wrong? Where do you turn to for help or support and backup... Downtime costs money!

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