What ecommerce platform should I use?

No Amazon is not customizable but it is easy to set up. However you need to look at cost.
Opening a store is a lot of work and the sales are going to be very slow, if at all (depending on the product) in the first few months.

Places like Amazon although they have the traffic also have a ton of vendors you will be competing with.
There is also the monthly cost associated.

When you use stores like Amazon, prostores, yahoo stores (do they have these still?), any hosted store solutions - you will be paying a monthly fee regardless if you sell anything or not. That can add up in the early stages of creating a store.
Then most of them charge processing fees on top of it.

If you use a self hosted store solution like ZenCart, OSCommerce, Magento the fees are only your personal hosting fees - what ever you pay to Hostgator or who ever you host with.

Both types of store solutions hosted or self hosted involve a learning curve for the basics such as uploading product and creating product pages.
Most of the hosted systems are limited in their styling capabilities.

I've had e-commerce stores since 2003
I've used many different solutions to sell - here is my experience.
eBay - I sell my discount stuff there - its too competitive (with low ball sellers) to sell full retail and make a decent profit. I use eBay to test the market. If it sells there it will sell in a regular e-commerce store.
ZenCart - I use this for all my stores - they rank well in the search engines - its been a good solution for me.
Magento - I've played with it but it has a different learning curve than ZenCart - its a good solution maybe even better than ZenCart
Amazon - I've had stores with them - I have one there now - the traffic isn't what you would expect. You have to have approval to sell in certain categories.


If you are looking for a solution that is just a few clicks to start selling you might want to have a look at eBay. Especially to do some testing before diving into a full store.

I did that with one of my other stores. I sold the products on eBay while I was building a Zencart store. It worked well as the items were popular.

Drop shipping - many people do it and with the economy the way it is many merchants are doing the drop shipping to move product.
It is not your best solution when trying to make a profit. Typically your buy rate is going to be pretty high
Which is another reason to sharpen your pencil when it comes to working with hosted solutions that cost you money each month

Hope that helps

There could be a few reasons why Amazon doesn't have your competitors.
It maybe the fees as there are more to Amazon fees then the monthly fee for the store. They charge a percent per sale.
Also since they are the ones processing the order and because you have to live by their return rules ( to a certain extent) your competitors may think its more of a hassle then its worth. It all depends on what program you use with them.

I'm not sure what categories are open either. Just because you want to sell with them doesn't mean they will let you in.
You may have a tough time with them since you are drop shipping or the category you want may be closed.
They are not keen to accept sellers who drop ship as that is one more step removed from the customer.

A lot of categories are closed or only open to major sellers. I had a store with them before and stopped because they wouldn't let me in the appropriate categories.
A few months ago they approached me to come back and I said I would if I could get into the categories I wanted.
The rep got my items approved - otherwise I would have said no.
To be honest I've been so busy with my regular stores that I haven't had a chance to really maximize the new Amazon store.
I wasn't all that impressed when I had it before but they've made changes so I thought I'd try them again.

Once again it all depends on the program you are using with them - they have a couple different ways to sell.

As for ranking - just because you with Amazon doesn't mean you will rank #1.
It's also easy to get lost in their pages

Another thing with them is you need UPC or ISBN codes on your products. That maybe another reason why there is less competition.
Not sure if your manufacturer puts UPC codes on everything or not.

PPC - I did that with the last store I built. While I was building I was selling the products on eBay which helped drive traffic to the new store.
For about 3 - 4 months I did PPC for the store until the rankings climbed for the same words I was paying for.
Over that 4 month period I'd drop certain keywords in my PPC campaigns as my store ranking climbed until eventually I wasn't doing PPC anymore.

Its easy to spend too much money on PPC.
The products that store carries doesn't allow for a lot of PPC. I found it was a waste of money. Not saying PPC is waste but you need to look at your cost vs your return and for that particular store 90% of my traffic came from organic search anyway. - no point paying for it as I would have been competing against myself.

For big ticket items with good profit margins PPC can be cost effective.
There is only one store we use PPC for on a regular basis. All the other ones I do it just when I have a sale.

Zencart - I've been using it since 2003 so I've seen a ton of growth over the years.
It has its own learning curve but there are resources out there to help you. A book was written and from I understand is a MUST HAVE.
It has a very active community. There are plenty of plugins and plenty of people who can help you with templates if you want something custom.

I'm building one now for a boat manufacturer and I've used wordpress on the front end as a way to pump more material out there for the search engines to index.

PM me if you want the url - you can see whats being built

Anyway, hope that helps

Yeah thats a huge help. I guess my main question is, how easy is zencart to skin? I use worpress everyday, its just so super easy! It sounds like maybe they can be intertwined.

I was referring to ranking within amazon not ranking on google for products in amazon. If I have several hundred products in a niche when someone searches within amazon will they see my product. If they do, as you say, get lost in the ton of products that amazon does have then there would not really be much point in using amazon.

I would like to see the site, I'll pm you. Thanks again for your help

I've used osCommerce, it does integrate with almost all 3rd party options. I got a skin developed on freelancer for $10

As for platforms here is a brief run down:

osCommerece, ZenCart, CRELoaded are all very similar and derived from the original osCommerce build. Lots of support and a large community for all of them.

Magento can be fantastic but you need to find good hosting and the learning curve for both operating and customizing is very long. Best to hire a programmer for customizing and you'll want to add extensions in time to increase useability and features. Hosting is also going to be pricey as this doesn't run well on shared hosting or regular servers, need to find a Magento specialist hosting company. Can get costly quick but has a large community behind it.

3dcart, Volusions, Shopify, etc are hosted cart solutions and may very well be the best place to start a store. While themes/design can be customized coding additional features will not be available as these are hosted systems. So if you want a feature that isn't available you will need to request that it be included in the next build...

I've been running webstores since before there were even cart systems out there. Literally just put up product pages and took phone orders. I've tried many many different cart systems. In the end, the trade off is almost always how much do you want to spend to save your time.

As suggested above, ZenCart is a nice option. Not terribly customizable unless you are adept at programming. But who cares, pay a few bucks to download a custom template or use the default templates and you can be up and running in a day, two at most. As a bonus, ZenCart now supports Checkout by Amazon. That might be a better solution for you rather than setting up your own merchant service account.

But if you are doing drop shipping with multiple suppliers, I'd recommend taking a look at X-Cart Pro. It supports multiple suppliers and can automatically parse out an order and e-mail instructions to each supplier. It even calculate shipping costs from each supplier. You can also give each supplier og-in access to their own backoffice area if you want them to set pricing, manage orders, and inventory. X-Cart supports a huge list of payment systems, including Checkout by Amazon, Google Check out, and PayPal, as well as all popular merchant service providers.

It's also highly customizable using Smarty Templates. You do not need to change the underlying PHP code to dramatically change the look and function. Unlike OsCommerce that makes me want to beat my head against the wall.

I've used X-Cart for about 8 years now. They have a large following in their forum, pretty good customer response, and several dozen third party solution providers.

Oh.. and it's very SEO friendly. I've remained on Google's 1st page for all my products for several years now.

My two cents

Okay, here's my advice...

I run an online only store that operates and sells in the U.S. only - though I set it up from Australia, which was quite a hassle.

Anyhow, I use Magento.

Despite what some might claim that Magento is very slow, I have found it perfectly fine. For hosting my website I use a company called Aspiration Hosting - Premium Hosting Solutions. I've found them to be excellent. You can get your store hosted on there for $4.99 per month on a sahred plan. As you get more traffic you can upgrade to give you better bandwidth etc, you'll probably find that a shared plan caosting $20 to $40 per month will be fine.

As for Magento: it's a great shopping cart to use. It's incredibly SEO friendly, you can add a heap of extensions when and when you feel you need them. On my store - Fitness Equipment | Exercise Equipment | Gym Equipment - I've added (among other, some of which were free) Review Reminder (which sends out review request sometime after you customers receive the goods - you'll find without chasing your customers for reviews you'll get next to zero customers coming back to your site to leave a review). Also, if you look at my checkout page you'll see it truly is a one-step, one-page checkout. This extension is called OneStepCheckout and was worth every penny.

If you do go with Magento I would suggest you look at a site that you like the look and functionality of (it can be your competitors or even a store from a completely different niche - I 'borrowed' the look and feel for my fitness equipment store from a furniture store!), then write a spec in Word and then look for someone or a company to code up the main webpages (home, category and product) the way you want. I can recommend IndianElite.com (I used them for my store) - they'll do a great job for you.

Also, dropshipping can be a great way to go. My site is 100% dropship. I sell large, expensive items and can't bulk buy and 'store in my garage'. You say that you're thinking of selling home and garden supplies so I think you'd have the same problem.

As to profit margins. I know you stated that the margins were very high but take into account shipping costs. Shipping large items across the States can be VERY expensive. Also, PPC may work for you but I found that AdWords was just too expensive. I used an ADWords professional and he couldn't get the costs down low enough to justify continuing the campaigns. I now am focusing on SEO and this is beginning to get results. If you do go into this venture I would strongly urge you todo SEO from day one. SEO takes time. Even if you don't have products on your website yet, Start the SEO work for the keyword you want.

I could go on and on but I won't

Good luck with you endeavor.

Robert