Offer E-commerce Advice

[Internet Gift Store]

As this forum seems to be about offering and sharing experience and advice then I would like to offer fellow members my experience within the online e-commerce reatil sector. I currently run a gift shop online and have been through the whole cycle of development, design, marketing, launching etc etc.

If anyone has any specific questions then I would be happy to help where I can.

Regards
IGS

[JimClark]

Hi IGS,
Im pottering around with the idea of creating my own website selling mens clothing and really do not know where to begin. I was going to start looking for a developer but do not know what info I would need in advance to take take to them. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Regards
Jim

[Pay As You Go Sim Cards]

Ah yes. I could use some advice. In the past we have created e-commerce sites with Actinic but now find it very slow when we start getting a lot of visitors.

In your opinion what is the most flexible e-commerce package to use. We want one that can scale up to larger number of visitors too.

Another thing we need to do is send phone card top up vouchers electronically. So we need something that can hadle emailing out our pin numbers.

Thanks for any help.

[Overseas Property]

I have the same question as Pay As You Go. Which e-commerce package would you use?

[andyf]

Originally Posted by JimClark

Hi IGS,
Im pottering around with the idea of creating my own website selling mens clothing and really do not know where to begin. I was going to start looking for a developer but do not know what info I would need in advance to take take to them. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Regards
Jim

First of all you will have to get a good developer for your site, Get it coded and designed. build SE friendly content with keeping user in mind.
Get a good and reliable host with maximum uptime and who is easily available round the clock for your support.

[isabellasucre]

what is the cost of a "good developer"? we have had quotes for a new site ranging from £3k to £10k. how do you decide who is better than the other???

we use names co uk to host our site, we have had little or no problem with them for the last 8 years.

thanks

[andyf]

It's really hard to point out a good developer from crowd, better try to find one who has been working in the industry for a long time had good reputation in market. You can decide this by looking at his portfolio or recent work or you can ask your friends or business partners who may help you.

Regarding hosting we are also from UK and have our servers in London datacenter with a total of 20,000mbits of network connectivity for all our Servers. We have 2 x 10 Gbps links for our datacenter. You can have a look at our plans at webhosting.UK com

[JimClark]

Went and checked your website out, you are doing some pretty good deals. Im probably going to take the plunge and get my site hosted by your company.

Found a developer too, a recommended by a mate.

[andyf]

Originally Posted by JimClark

Went and checked your website out, you are doing some pretty good deals. Im probably going to take the plunge and get my site hosted by your company.

Found a developer too, a recommended by a mate.

That's great.....
Jim, you can contact me at MSN/Mail at harry@webhosting.ukDOTcom if you need any assistance regarding hosting and SEO. { I would feel better for helping you in making your site SEO friendly along with reliable hosting }

[djlins]

Kool, I wont offer my services (although I am a dandy developer heheh)
But just some advice with e-commerce packages I have used in the past.

WorldPay - rip off and wouldnt touch them.

PayPal - on the expensive side, however they have been in it a while and I have successfully used them a few times if the customer is willing to pay their premiums. They are easy to set up

Secure-Hosting - a lot cheaper than PayPal and as easy to set up, but there are some pitfalls.
If you can go to credit card payment page on their gateway and stop the payment process at their server (this means your admin has to log in with their secure-hosting account to see the successful transactions, or they can get emailed to you when transaction is complete)
But you should bear in mind recently I have a situation where I need to come back to my server after a successful transaction to automatically complete the status of stock and orders etc.
This is where the trouble lies with secure-hosting because if you set a session, and pass something out to expect a value back (like a GUID you saved against the session ID in a DB temporary table or something) then I am now hitting times where the values are getting lost in their systems. I dont know if it is on certain browsers or if the user hits "Submit card details" twice or something, but I get back to my complete transaction page with no session ID and no GUID and my system cannot complete the transaction that end. The point I am getting to is their support have basically said it isnt their problem and wont look into it, which I wasnt too chuffed about. So my system has to expect about 1 in every 30 transactions to fail at the moment even though their account says the user did pay.

Google checkout - I havent actually used it in any websites yet, but have had a play around with it in the sandbox and it looked very nice, and very user friendly (enter details once, and then can be used across sites much like paypal only cheaper, free even for 2008 if you use AdWords).

Datacash - I had to write a dotnet payment system and a MIVA payment gateway for Datacash. That was quite a mission, but datacash do give you absolute full control over card validation, although I did need my own SSL for card details collection, datacash merely processed the payment and gave a reply of payment accepted or rejected.


Phew, thats my two penneths worth, let me know if you have any questions.


L