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Cheapest Way To Host An E-Commerce Site With Great Themes?

by Allurre
9 replies
Hey guys, which are the best e-commerce sites, easy to use and set up lately?

For now, I'm looking at bigcartel.com and auctiva.com

Looking forward to sell fashion goods.

Any recommendations?
#cheapest #ecommerce #great #host #site #themes
  • Profile picture of the author Aaron Elliott
    I use Oscommerce - free, you download for free and put it on ur server. You can download themes there are some sites on the net which makes themes. My site is Kitejunkiee - Kitesurfing Sunglasses, Hook Knifes & Accessories, its very easy once setup. Setting it up I had af ew minor issues, but thats all about learning the software.
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  • Profile picture of the author eshannon
    If you're doing ecommerce, going cheap will get you nowhere. You need a professional design. And I don't mean professional by Warrior Forum standards, I mean on the same level as a Target or an LL Bean.

    You'll need at least a few grand if you're gonna take it seriously.

    As far as the cart goes, if you're looking to go the inexpensive route, look into Yahoo stores or Volusion. Yeah, OS Commerce is free, but you'll need a programmer to do your modifications... which will add up.

    We started our ecommerce store with $8k. Spent about $2k on design, a little over $2k on programming (xcart), the rest was for the initial ppc costs.

    Sure, you can do it cheaper... but, doing zillions of site reviews in stompernet showed me that the sites that go cheap on design/programming almost always bomb. These are the people asking "how come I'm only doing $1k/month in sales after 6 months?"
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    Eric Shannon

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  • Profile picture of the author Allurre
    Wow. That's a lot for startup cost on a site! and design itself =O
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    LUXLIVIN www.luxlivinonline.com

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    • Profile picture of the author eshannon
      Originally Posted by Allurre View Post

      Wow. That's a lot for startup cost on a site! and design itself =O
      Not if you're building a real business. You said you want to sell fashion stuff, right? I can PROMISE you that your sales will be horrible if you go with a sub-par design.
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      Eric Shannon

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  • Profile picture of the author Aaron Elliott
    not everyone has got $12,000 to invest in a store. I say get the free store, there are some great free templates out there and u can modify them. If u make some money, then reinvest in a new store....
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    • Profile picture of the author eshannon
      Originally Posted by Kitejunkiee View Post

      not everyone has got $12,000 to invest in a store. I say get the free store, there are some great free templates out there and u can modify them. If u make some money, then reinvest in a new store....
      Yeah, and what I'm saying is that if you're not going to invest any money, then ecommerce stores are a HUGE longshot.

      Not knocking your site here, Kitejunkie, but your store looks like it didn't spend too much in development, right? How's your conversion? Pretty challenging, right?

      My point is.... if someone is looking to make money without spending any significant money, then there's FAR better gameplans than selling physical products. (unless you're selling a truly unique item that people need/want)

      There's exceptions, sure, but based on everything I've seen & experienced, I'm saying that selling fashion items on a $0 budget is a huge huge longshot.
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      Eric Shannon

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  • Profile picture of the author kdevarney
    Yes fashion is a very competive market for sure. Depending on what you are selling I would say go with something like Volusion and pay an seo company to get your site out there shop around as seo can be very expensive but worth it after you make some money then reinvest in your business.
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  • Profile picture of the author Silas Hart
    There are some amazing templates in the $400 range especially in the fashion category. (Fashion and Electronics you will find some of the nicest categories) With a good $500, you can get it set up and customized to your liking, and I recommend something like Magento for all the things you can do with it. OpenCart is good to get started with too imo.

    As far as setting up with your SEO and Advertising, I wouldn't even start with less than $1,000 or else you are going to be swimming around in a huge pool of high quality sites with great low priced products, with no way of people finding their site.
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    • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
      Im going to have to disagree not from experience but from observation.

      A lot of it has to do with your product. I am currently working at a furniture store and do their IT. I do websites as a side business and have owned my own website design company in the past that I later sold.

      My boss at the furniture store is very old school. We don't even have computers to track inventory, everything is done by hand. We are getting decimated by Internet retailers because of "no sales tax" on out of state orders. Our major supplier specifically forbids lowering the price under penalty of violating the contract.

      So we are looking into Internet sales.

      Most of my competitors do NOT have professional looking sites. But they do have a product customers want. One that is near us is doing $100K per month in sales on a crappy site using Americart (?) and another does at least that amount of business using a hand written system. They aren't even using secure ordering procedures.

      My point is if you have a good product, you don't have to worry as much about the looks of the site.
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