I am a professional graphic designer and web developer. I build websites and update them every day and I've offered several times on this board to give free advice if anyone wants to pm me. I have gotten a lot of pm's and one question has come up many times:
What website/company/software should I use to set up my online store? There is currently
a thread here about one specific option.
There is not one perfect solution for everyone so I thought it would be helpful to start a discussion about different ecommerce options so that we can try to find some good solutions for members and rule out some bad ones. Most of the members here do this as a hobby or a 2nd job so spending a lot of money on their online store is not an option. Most of you are looking for a free or cheap option. I started this thread so that I can answer some common questions and to begin a discussion about websites and web stores so that we can all share information and learn from each other. I have been pm'ing a lot of the same information to different people so I thought it would make sense to do it here for everyone to read and share.
Website Costs
There are some costs associated with a website that apply to everyone: domain name and hosting. You have to pay to reserve your domain name (tackleunderground.com, google.com, etc.) There are many websites that do this for you. The most well known is probably godaddy.com but if you look, you can reserve your domain name for as little as $10/year. Check Yahoo small business for example.
In addition to reserving your domain name you need to sign up for a hosting account. In order for your website or store to be available on the www it has to be located on a server which is basically a computer hard drive that is accessible to everyone on the internet. Hosting a store usually costs a little more than hosting a website without a store. You can host a website for about $100/year and a store for $15-40/month. Web hosting packages usually include email accounts as well. All of the different web hosts offer lots of other features as well as incentives. If you don't know what these features are when you are comparing plans you should just focus on the price, storage, bandwith, and number of email accounts. If you plan on building your own site you'll obviously want a host that offers website-building tools. I think it's important to chose a host that has been recommended to you. There are a lot of bad hosting companies so it's important to know from someone you trust that they have had good experiences with the host and little or no down-time on their site.
Website Alternatives
Another option that some people do is to open an ebay store. This is good because you don't have to pay to have your site built or take the time to build one yourself. There is little or no money to put up front. The tools required to build your ebay site are very simple to use. You can easily do it yourself without any technical skill or coding knowledge. With ebay stores you can auction items and/or sell them for a set price. The downside to having an ebay store is that your website is not very unique, it sort of blends in with all of the other ebay stores. One solution to that is to have a designer create a logo for your company and use that on your ebay store. Another downside is that you pay ebay a portion of your profits.
Finding a Web Host
There are tons of companies that offer web hosting. Most of them offer ecommerce packages that include support for a shopping cart and credit card processing. Some include tools to design and build your own site as well. There are so many companies and so many optiions that I think most people become overwhelmed and confused. Since I build most of my websites from scratch I do not have a lot of experience with the options that include the tools to build and design your own site. I think this is what a lot of T.U. members are looking for. So for those of you that have an online store now, what companies/software solutions have you used? Would you recommend it? Are the site-building tools easy to use?
Here are some options that I am familiar with:
OSCommerce - Oscommerce is a free,
open source, ecommerce solution. It basically sets up the infrastructure of your site for you and you customize it. You can change the fonts, background colors, text, and graphics through an interface (you don't need to know code). You can easily enter and remove products with descriptions, prices, etc. It also includes shopping cart functionality, checkout and a bunch of other features as well. Once it's set up and running it's very easy to maintain. This option would require you to set up your web hosting with a web hosting company , then install the oscommerce software on their server. I think this is a great option for someone who is computer literate and has time to devote to it.
Yahoo Merchant - This is a very simple system. It includes your hosting, database, user interface, tools to build and update your site, etc. They offer some nice extras like coupons and marketing emails but that may or may not be worth it to you. They are priced slightly higher than others but they have good service and support. Keep in mind that in general the better known companies (yahoo, godaddy, etc.) charge more then the little-known competitors. This does not necessarily mean you are getting more. For example, I use
aplus.net for my website hosting needs. They are very affordable and I have had nothing but good experiences with them. I have not tried their
ecommerce option so I can't recommend it specifically but I would certainly consider it based on my other experiences with the company.
Paypal Website Payments Standard - You are probably all familiar with paypal in terms of purchasing goods from ebay and other tackle makers. In addition, paypal allows you to create buttons for use on your site to purchase your products. This is a great option if you know html or are willing to learn it. You design and build your site and then pop in the simple paypal buttons for purchasing.
FYI, if you use paypal as your gateway (payment processing) then your clients can pay with paypal
or credit card. Years ago buyers had to have a paypal account to make purchases from you but that is no longer the case making paypal a really good option for receiving payments.
Google Checkout - I have not used this yet. If anyone has I'd love to hear about your experience.
Some Notes About Design
Keep it simple. A lot of amateur designers fill their website with animated gifs and flashing lights and sirens and crap like that. Focus on your product. Make the site simple and easy to read and easy to navigate and find products. If all of the text on your site is big and bright then none of it stands out. Keep it all relatively small and not bold. Think "clean and simple." Then when you want to highlight something important you can bold it and it will stand out.
Photography is very important. This is probably the most important thing on your site not to skimp on. If you can hire a photographer to shoot your product it's worth it. If you can't afford a lot of photographs just have him/her shoot 1 of each product and use a color chart instead of having photographs of every color combination. Or look for a college student learning photography to do it for you.
Advertising, Marketing & Promoting
2 big things here, advertising and S.E.O. (search engine optimization).
I personally think the best and most affordable advertising option for a tackle website is to buy an ad on a fishing website or forum. It's relatively cheap and it's aimed directly at your customer base.
SEO basically means optimizing your placement on search engines (google, yahoo, etc.) when users search for products relevant to your store. There are many things you can do to improve your search engine ranking. One of the members here works in
SEO, so I'll leave it up to him to give us some tips.
Ways to Save Money
You get what you pay for, but we all have budget limitations so if you have to cut corners here are some ideas:
- Hire a student This is dangerous territory because they are inexperienced. But they are cheap. I would make sure you know exactly what you want and communicate that clearly up front. In general, I would not rely on an inexperienced student to guide you along in the website process unless you know exactly what you want.
- Build the store and website yourself using a package that has design tools, then hire a professional to create a custom header graphic, accent graphics and tweak the color scheme of the site to tie it all in together. I have done this for several clients and it's a nice way to save money and still have a professional looking site.
I look forward to hearing what you all think. I don't claim to know everything - the above is just my opinion based on my experience and I am just putting it out there to hopefully help out the T.U. family.
