Santa Rosa Business Daily

What is the best (and possibly cheapest) way to set up an e-commerce website?

My technical skills are good, so I would like to design a custom made e-commerce site. Hence I'm not interested in using ebay! Thanks for your opinions !

Public Comments

1. Homestead.com
2. Most commerce packages will limit your business somehow, either by limiting the number of inventory items in the database, or by having escalating fees. The cheapest way is to do it yourself, i.e. process your own credit card transactions, so you just need to develop an inventory database plus CGI applications to tally each transaction, verify the card number, and add the order to a log file. Then all you need to do is manually process the credit card to your business C/C account and ship the goods. It's easy to manage and relatively problem-free. The main problem is fraud, example: orders placed with stolen credit cards, but that can be managed by getting an authorization for each transaction. If you watch it daily, the total system is easy to manage. UPS (but not FedEx) can handle all the shipping.
3. Hi Crimson: If your looking to make a living or just some quick cash, you may not even need a web site. 90% of new millionaires are internet millionaires and the advantages of an e-commerce (making money on the internet) business can't be beat. You can set your own hours, work from anywhere you have access to a computer and make anywhere from a couple of hundred to a few thousand per week. But before you have a web site, you need a product or service that people want or need. (your traffic for your web site) Get some ideas at the link below...and may you have much success...
4. Hello Crimson We write our own sites - we use Easyspace for our domain names and hosting - and use Roman Cart for our shop, which links to our business Paypal account. Easyspace is reasonably priced - about £30 each for domain names and hosting. It's very simple to upload your files once you've written your site. Roman Cart charges £99 plus VAT for a cart containing 500 items. if you go up to the next level of 2000 items it's £149 plus VAT for the year. You can upload 50 items at a time into your shop. You can customise your shop so that it integrates well with your website. Paypal is the simplest payment form to use. It's easy to transfer money to your bank account and you only pay when a customer buys. No monthly charges. Good luck! Rosemary