Ecommerce for local business - expert advice needed | Warrior Forum - The #1 Digital Marketing Forum & Marketplace

13 years ago

Originally Posted by lmooney1028

Hi,

Has anyone here tried doing ecommerce for local business?

If they have what are the problems with it? - By this i mean why isn't everyone getiing their local business' to sell things online?

I'm thinking of doing it but i'm sure i can't be the only person who has thought of it.

yes but the biggest problem they face is managing inventory and figuring out shipping fulfillment, and maintaning it....and for some these are just daunting to think about...it forces many of them to retool their processes...its really not just a plug and play type of thing like it is for IM'ers who dropship.

I like to use a company called BigCommerce for my ecommerce stores..but there are several very good ones.

Thanks

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javarog

13 years ago

I do my share of ecommerce sites and they are a pain and that's why you should charge accordingly ,, The merchant has a learning curve if they have not run a online business before.. There are several subscription carts, 3-d cart, bigcart, americart and they all have a drop shipping feature that will calculate shipping from various warehouse locations,, if they ship from their location then there are a couple of open source that are good such as Ecwid and opencart... for owned carts my favorite and what I use for my biz is x-cart, however you have to buy some mods to get shipping from different locations...

Thanks

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SiteSmarty

13 years ago

I'm not an ecommerce guy but one thought would be to have your local business choose a few products and try using Amazon fulfillment with an Amazon ecommerce site. This might work good if you approached a small manufacturer in your local area. Once you get the system down, you could offer your "go between" services to other businesses.

This way all you would have to do is market our own business, have the manufacturer ship their products to Amazon and you outsource the Amazon website stuff, although it looks like the Amazon website tool is easy to use, so you might be able to do the site yourself.