I’d to sell a number of books online. It total, there will be about 25 books, and possibly more in the future. I’m looking to make a simple, stylish page that lists the books by category, accepts orders from credit cards and paypal, and have the money deposited into a UK bank account (Natwest or Barclays). So I’ll need the works… storefront, cart, payment processing etc.
The site needs to accept orders from different countries (different currencies?), and calculate the postage from rates I give it. The books are printed by lightning source. Lightning source have an EDI or XML interface, where you can upload a file with the order details to an FTP server and they fulfil the order. Something which could work with this in the future to automate things is a big plus. Also the ability to easily add new books to the site.
I’ve looked at a few options, but, for someone who is new to ecommerce, it’s confusing, and there’s a lot of different options.
I have some experience in html, css and python (although not for web programming). I’d prefer something that is easy to work with, and doesn’t require me getting my hands dirty with the details of the code. Don’t mind spending a little money to save time, upto maybe $40 per month.
Can someone make a recomendations for how to go about this? Thanks in advance.
There are lots of hosted shopping carts out there that take all the hassle out of this, and they usually cost around $20 per month, or nothing at all—instead taking a cut of the sale. Each one is different, so you have to check which best suits your needs, but ones to look at include FoxyCart, FastSpring, Plimus, BigCartel, Shopify… lots of them. Using these, you can build a pretty simple website that just links to these carts, which you can usually skin to look like your own site.
Another option is to install a ready-made CMS and manage it yourself, like Magento and osCommerce. There is more responsibility in working with these, though. You need SSL certificates and have t manage any situation that comes up.
Hi David
There is aso Virtuemart which runs with Joomla , I have not used the others but know that although there is a bit of a learning curve in the beginning the end result is worth it , you can by a pre made template and quite literally be up in no time . With Joomla and virtue mart it is open source software and will not cost you , you will only have the charge of the domain name etc
I would suggest going with a hosted shopping cart. They are easy to use, they backup your store every night, provide software updates, redundant architecture for maximum up time, etc.
Run a search for “hosted shopping cart” and you should come up with several options. Make sure to ask about the points I mentioned above as not ALL shopping carts my provide you with these kind of services.
Guys at Avactis will set up a store for you for under $40/month, and then write an addon to post orders via FTP, for a fee. They seem to have Barclays module already, and multi-currency.
