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New to eCommerce - Potential Issues/Difficulties that Could Arise?

by gary varga
10 replies
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Hi all,

I am looking to establish an online store, however I am quite new to the whole ecommerce thing. I am looking at the various ecommerce platforms out there and as you all know, some of the are open source (i.e. Magento CE), while some charge for a monthly fee (i.e. Shopify).

I am having a hard time determining whether I should use an open source platform and just host it with my host (Bluehost) or go with the paid service and not worry about any difficulties that could arise during a traffic surge, etc.

Could someone tell me what kind of issues or difficulties could arise if I use, for instance, Magento CE and use my own host? Could these issues be so serious that it would take an expert to fix?

Thanks
#arose #ecommerce #issues or difficulties #potential
  • Profile picture of the author kjamesnv
    Magento is an awesome platform and extremely powerful. However I strongly recommend that you use a hosting company that specializes in Magento hosting. Trust me it will save you lots of headaches. If you try running Magento on a cheap shared host it may work but the performance will not be good.

    We use Nexcess.net but there are several others like magemojo.com.
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    • Profile picture of the author gary varga
      Originally Posted by kjamesnv View Post

      Magento is an awesome platform and extremely powerful. However I strongly recommend that you use a hosting company that specializes in Magento hosting. Trust me it will save you lots of headaches. If you try running Magento on a cheap shared host it may work but the performance will not be good.

      We use Nexcess.net but there are several others like magemojo.com.
      Thanks for the advice. I wasn't aware that there are hosts that specialize in hosting Magento shops.
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      • Profile picture of the author Darkhealer
        Any good resources for marketing or positioning in a certain way to not just be something that Amazon could do instead?
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        • Profile picture of the author marclove
          Do you have techinical knowledge in implementing or modifying the codes? Just to share, i have very basic technical knowledge and the issues i faced most of the time is customisation and upgrades of the themes/plugins (which may conflict with your customised theme) and troubleshooting errors. The good thing is most solutions can be found on the internet. So if you do not want to drive into techinical, it may be best to go for the one-store options like shopify and etc..
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  • Profile picture of the author Ecommerce Advice
    I would certainly choose a hosting company that specializes in Magento. They can help set it up so it runs faster. You probably want a 'managed' option so they install any new updates to the server.

    I use Magento all the time for my sites (I do 7 figures) and it works perfectly. We have thousands of products in the database.

    Since it's part owned by PayPal it shouldn't disappear anytime soon.

    Plus now that it is so popular there are plugings for almost anything you can imagine and if not you can get a developer to custom write stuff for you. Support is fairly cheap and easy if you use sites like Elance.

    I do a whole course (below) about running a ecommerce site if you are interested.
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  • Profile picture of the author Freshmorning
    You can use OpenCart as well.
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    • Profile picture of the author OnlineStoreHelp
      I think you have to ask yourself, what are you selling, and what functionality do you need to run it.

      For example, I know one girl that has a total of 20 products in a single niche without any categories or variants, someone put her on Magento and it is complete and utter overkill. That business was designed for Shopify.

      Are you going to have thousands of products with multiple categories, sub-categories, product variants, etc, then yes, Magento, or OpenCart or Prestashop might be a good choice for you.

      Somewhere in between? Then using a cart that can do most of it without all the hassles might very well be in your best interest. Something like BigCommerce or Corecommerce might very well fit your needs with access to third party tools, quality hosting, CDN out of the box and PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance.

      Getting the right cart for your business, not what developers like or others like is always key. I have put customers on carts I can't stand because they did things specifically that they wanted that my preferred carts wouldn't do.

      So, if you can lay out your needs, we can give you better advice then, golly magento is super powerful and get good hosting, or man Shopify is the bomb and it's what I suggest to everyone!
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      Learn how to set up a powerful, functional yet easy to use e-commerce website at cartprep.com.

      Not sure what ecommerce solution to use? Watch my video walk through of popular shopping carts.
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  • Profile picture of the author LynxForte
    Gary,

    I currently work for a large and successful online retailer. Here's a quick shortlist of what to do BEFORE you decide to do ecommerce.

    -Research a niche
    -DON'T plan on dropshipping to make money - plan on starting to use dropshipping and graduating to buying in bulk as quickly as you can
    -Be ready to invest - it is not cheap to enter the online retail market. You need a good site, you need good content, and you need to run the operations yourself (purchasing, accounting, content management, marketing, web development, customer service, etc etc etc)
    - Create a brand. This is what matter in the world of online marketing. You need to build marketing channels around your brand, not your products.
    - Use a web designer that knows his stuff, if you're ready to commit to running a successful ecommerce project (60-80 hours weeks for a while, my friend).
    - Get investment. You absolutely need this. To be able to make a decent amount of money in online retail you need to get friends and family to invest so you can have an inventory.
    - Research, research, research. Do not go into this hoping you'll figure it out along the way. Know EXCATLY what you want to do BEFORE you do it.

    Most important lesson is this - DO NOT skip out on important steps in web development or design. DO NOT hope to fix something later and upload hundreds or thousands of products. Retrofixing something you left for later is significantly more expensive down the road.

    Hope this helped!
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  • Profile picture of the author Gailun
    Magento Community Edition is open source software and can be downloaded for free. Developers can modify the core code and add features and functionality by installing extensions from the Magento Connect marketplace.
    Businesses using Community Edition to run their stores will want to have access to their own Magento experts, since Magento does not provide technical support for this software. Answers to many technical questions are available on our user forum.
    Certainly encounter problems, but the Internet has really understand solutions.
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  • Profile picture of the author amcg
    Originally Posted by gary varga View Post

    Hi all,

    I am looking to establish an online store, however I am quite new to the whole ecommerce thing. I am looking at the various ecommerce platforms out there and as you all know, some of the are open source (i.e. Magento CE), while some charge for a monthly fee (i.e. Shopify).

    I am having a hard time determining whether I should use an open source platform and just host it with my host (Bluehost) or go with the paid service and not worry about any difficulties that could arise during a traffic surge, etc.

    Could someone tell me what kind of issues or difficulties could arise if I use, for instance, Magento CE and use my own host? Could these issues be so serious that it would take an expert to fix?

    Thanks
    If it's your first ecommerce business, even if you're a developer or semi-technical, I'd still recommend using a hosted ecommerce solution. My particular recommendations are Shopify and BigCommerce. Using them means you can get up and runnning quickly whilst focusing on the business.

    You will eventually want to self host/run your own platform at a later date but until then, learn the ropes of the business by relying on others.
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