Ecommerce Newbie - Anything on Vendio free online store??

I've got no experience with Vendio, however I searched some reviews and found mixed reviews about them. Now its your turn to decide whether you want to opt their services or not. By the way, free hosting is not a good idea for online store website.

On the other hand you can host your e-shop website on reliable shared hosting account, which is not so costly. I mean, compare your daily expenses to monthly price of shared hosting account. I am sure you will find the right answer for yourself.

In addition if you opt paid hosting services, then you can easily use the most secured shopping cart software without any hassle. In my opinion, you should prefer Magneto or OScommerce shopping cart, and spend some money on web hosting.

About the hosting, you can choose shared webhosting such as hostgator as it is quite cheap, around 8 bucks per month. Treat it as an investment. You can then install the ecommerce site easily using Fantastico - newbie friendly -, which is mostly available for free with your shared hosting.

Another expense is for domain which is around 10 bucks per year. Recently Godaddy has coupon "Aces1" for 1 buck .com domain name in the first year. I guess the deal is still on.

By having your own ecommerce site, you have greater control on it and you have an asset. By having an asset, you can sell it in the future and the money will go to you.

In 2009, the Vendio sales team was about as slimy as you can get. Bait and Switch tactics. Vendio tech support was fine, just at the mercy of getting calls from angry users that were sold Service A and given a sub-par Service B with back-end added costs.

If Vendio has improved in the past year and a half, I haven't heard about it, but will concede if someone who currently uses them can step up and give me an updated opinion.

I'm currently using CoreCommerce, for the past 3 years, however, I feel like I have to solve 1/4 of the tech support issues on my own as they "can't replicate the problem".

I'm looking around too.

As to the "free" prospect, spend a little money to get a better product, unless you can find a decent open-source platform.

BJ

I don´t know much about the Vendio Free shop, but i did created one vendio shop that is payed where you can manage on their platform the vendio store, ebay store or auctions and amazon store, you can add a product on the store and at the same time on the ebay and amazon, you can manage all of it from vendio, then you have many apps to improves sells and crossed platforms, for ex. google products, shopping.com and shopzilla. Then you also have an interesting app that´s called facebook store, where you store sync.. with your facebook account, i believe for the price is very good.

DollyD,

If you're serious about getting into eCommerce then you should think long term. I don't know anything about Vendio but why tie yourself in to a company's hosting plans or anything else for that matter?

I run my eCommerce store using Magento. It's open source and free. The basic template isn't great and you'll want to get your own unique design. A GREAT design will cost you no more than $800 - you can even get much cheaper than this.

When starting off I went with a shared hosting plan from a company called AspirationHosting. The basic shared hosting costs about $5.99 a month - peanuts. Once you get traffic and are making a profit then you can upgrade to a limited shared hosting plan costing about $20.

Like I said, if you're serious then don't tie yourself in with any vendor. I recommend Magento because it's a great piece of software that is well known so there are lots of smart people out there who can bespoke it anyway you want and the forum is active and you can get a lot of advise and tips from there.

I totally agree with Robert here. Your expenses will return to you in many folds when you are dedicated in what your doing.