Posts tagged e-commerce-website

Setting up a secure e-commerce website for under £100

1714 days
by in Web Mastering

Well hairfreax needed a revamp, and with the launch of Cubecart 4, I decided to do just that.

Cube 4 at a minimum (keeping the copyright notices) ~ £78 with the VAT added (subject to exchange rate as the price is quoted in dollars)

Your website needs to be secure, so with a £14 SSL certificate from Trusico (£12 plus VAT) the whole e-commerce website costs you £92…

This means you have £8 left to put towards your hosting, the cheapest (and most reliable) I have found in the UK is OxyUK, at 99p a month, the very basics you need. If you need more then I would pay no more than £5 per month for hosting and emails.

Once your SSL cert is installed (usually with help from your host) you can install cube pretty easily as well as..

- Google Checkout
- PayPal Payments Pro

The two designs they have for you are basic, but enough to get you by in your early stages of e-commerce. You can have a professionally designed skin once you know your brilliant idea makes money. Don’t think setting up an e-commerce store can cost the earth or cause you trouble…

You can get a 14 day trial with cube 4 and still FREE access to cube 3 (and the upgrading is almost seamless I tell you).

If you want to know what they get up too, visit the CubeCart Development Blog

What functionality to make sure you have when investing in an e-commerce platform…

1742 days
by in Web Mastering

If you buying and not going down the open source route with applications such as ‘Oscommerce‘ and you do not know how to edit code….

Make sure you brand spanking new e-commerce store:

1. Is hosted on your own servers (so you can bulk FTP images, and have control over uptime and not held to ransom)
2. Has a bulk upload,UPDATE and export facility for inventory
3. Has drop down options for products with associated inventory quantity
4. Has space for meta keywords and descriptions
5. Uses SEF URLs (Text Based URLs)
6. Is Integrated with the payment processor YOU use, or want to use. (Google Checkout, Paypal Payments Pro etc)
7. Does not require your customers to create an account to buy an item
8. Has an export function for your customer data and sales.
9. Has efficient searching and sorting functionality for the back end.
10. Enables you to set stages for your order processing and fire emails off at each or one stage to your customer.
11. Does not use frames.
12. Confirms the sale to your buyer, in an email invoice or confirmation page
13. Has the option to print out packing invoices or any kind of invoice really.

OK, there are more, but this is just a list I found lacking on one such e-commerce set up that will remain nameless. I will add to the list once I have found more e-commerce store must haves!

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