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• Reputation: 105 Q&A: 3 0 0 45 2 0 Classifieds: 2 0 what's this? Expert: 1 topic Geek Week Moderator Jay Jansheski is a moderator on Questionland Seattle Follow Following 0 Jay Jansheski

  1 0 Looking at that site, they say they offer “shopping carts” as a feature, but I don’t see any way to find out what that means, so I can’t address their setup directly. It’s likely they have some sort of click-to-install e-commerce type widget, which may be fine for what you need. What I can do is tell you a little about what I found out when I was recently slogging through the world of low-end e-commerce for a project my Dad was working on. The e-commerce setup you choose will depend upon three things: What you're willing to pay, what level of complexity you need, and what level of design polish you need. So, what are you willing to pay? If the answer is nothing (which seems likely), that’s okay. There are free options out there. “Free” obviously doesn’t include things like fees for credit card processing and merchant accounts; there is no free where those are concerned. The bank will have its take. I recently took a look at all the low-end e-commerce systems for my dad, and the best thing I could find was WordPress with the WP eCommerce plugin. Both of those are free, and in my opinion they’re pretty easy to install and manage (relative to systems like Drupal and Joomla). The WP eCommerce plugin handles the highest level of complexity I could find at its price level (customizable shipping options by weight, product variations, multiple currencies, etc.) I also find WordPress to be really easy to customize if you know a little bit of PHP, HTML, and CSS. For a moderate sum (less than $100) you can buy a sharp (if not unique) template. There are so many WordPress template offerings out there that it is impossible not to find them, so I won’t bother listing them here. Google “WordPress e-commerce templates”. I SAID GOOGLE IT If WordPress won’t cut it for you, the best cheap-but-not-free options I could find were FoxyCart and Shopify. FoxyCart works by including their scripts on your website, which then open up modals and/or popup windows when people do anything commercey like click “add to cart.” I haven’t used it, but it seems very easy and good. Their cheapest (only?) plan at time of this writing is $19 a month. If you are like my dad, you will find that to be an outrageous sum and you will shake your fist in the air. FoxyCart will be easier to implement than WordPress. Shopify is a hosted solution, which means it’s not going to work on BigBytes; with Shopify, you sign in to their server and enter your products, and they do everything else. This is the easiest and most elegant solution, but also the most expensive of the acceptable low-end solutions I could find. ($29 a month! $29! shakes fist). Really, that is not very much money if you’re serious about setting up shop. If you know HTML and CSS you can customize your store as much as you like, but it will always be on their servers. All three of these solutions are stable, which is to say they’ve been around a long time and they probably will continue to be around for a long time. There are most definitely other solutions – there are literally thousands of them – but these are what I came up with. All three of these solutions will require understanding to some extent how products and shipping options and whatnot all fit together. This is my answer if you’re looking for a way to set up a little store online and sell some stuff. If you’re after a way to learn how to build an e-commerce website so that you can know how to build an e-commerce website, my answer would be completely different (short version of that alternate answer: play with wordpress to see what it looks like, then go buy yourself a book called something like “Build your own e-commerce website with (PHP/Ruby on Rails/Django) today!”) One last note: I know you didn’t ask for advice on hosting services. I don’t know anything about BigBytes (other than that their website gives me the wiggins) but I have had good luck with both Dreamhost and Site5. Two last note: Lots of people seem to do well selling their wares through systems like Amazon stores and eBay, so if all you want to do is sell things, that may be an option. Here’s a summary: Free solution: WordPress and the WP e-Commerce plugin - Pros: Free, sorta easy to set up if you know some stuff about clicking. - Cons: It’s the least easy of these solutions to set up. It will scale, but not without some effort and know-how. Less free solution: FoxyCart - Pros: Cheap, pretty dang easy to set up. It’s mostly your regular site that “pops up” for cart and checkout stuff. - Cons: More expensive than free, still takes knowing how to cut and paste, which some people do not know how to do. Even less free solution: Shopify - Pros: Very easy. - Cons: $29 a month for the cheapest plan (which is still very cheap, but not free). It’s not portable, which is to say you couldn’t tell Shopify to shove it and move the store to another hosting solution. Good luck! Jay Jansheski answered in Geek Week 10 months ago | Report 1 comment by Brooklyn Reader… 0 0 Thanks, Jay! I appreciate the wealth of info and thoughtfulness packed into your response. Oddly enough, this is a project for my Dad, too, so it might make sense to choose something that might have an interface he could maintain himself once I set it up for him. I'll check out the leads, and might even see which carts come with the tools I've already got. Thanks again. Brooklyn Reader commented 10 months ago | Report Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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