The pains of creating an online store 2
Posted Thursday, June 18, 2009 14:48
I’ve recently been helping my sister put together an online store, using Volusion. It has been eye-opening how complex they make it and how clunky this system is. This is a product that is ripe for being replaced with something a lot cleaner.
We looked at Shopify as well, but their business model of taking a cut of the transaction was a turn-off. And there’s always Yahoo Stores, but they tend to be, well, ugly.
On the surface, an online store is pretty simple. We can build simple ones with Webvanta, using PayPal or another third-party shopping card, but it’s not a complete ecommerce solution. The tricky bits come when you need to deal with tax by county, shipping options, returns, out-of-stock items, fulfillment workflows, etc. In time, we’ll make Webvanta a good solution for this, probably by integrating an existing third-party solution.
Do you know of any great solutions for simple online stores, either complete sites or hosted shopping carts that we can integrate? I’d like to be able to refer people to something great.
And just in case you’re looking for some inexpensive and very cool outdoor furniture, check out the Classic Butterfly Chairs at SimplySlater.com.
Well, it may be time for Webvanta-if you have not by now-to get on this. My site is a carousel of responses to the issues you raise above in setting up a simple first ecommerce site. But, it seemed to work, if a little clunkily. It is now stagnant as I am spending so much time comparing ecommerce packages rather than marketing my own solutions for choral musicians! I would like to talk to you as I want to stay local, I know David at Spartina and, I am about to sign up with Shopify and a local developer. My business is definitely a speciaized niche but hey, then again, so was “Goddess” wear at one time! Is your objection to Shopify only based on the cut? Are they unique in this regard? Is Network solutions somehting your sister might try? Check WebAdvantage in Cairns, Australia…I stumbled over them in my search for your biz. I am open to a tweet, facebook comment or a good old fashioned phone call: check my contact info at www.choirgear.com. Thank you.
An update:My sister launched SimplySlater with Volusion, but she was never able to get it to look or behave how she wanted and she shut it down. We rebuilt it for her with Webvanta, and it is now live and doing great! www.simplyslater.com
And I’ll have an update about Jo McCormick’s site, with regard to the prior comment, shortly.