Do you have problem to start your own e-Commerce website? Did your last shopping cart ended up losing you money? We had problems with building an e-Commerce website when we first started. We have heard many horror stories too. Here is a story of our client that you probably can relate to and also can serve as a reminder to us all.
Tim (not his real name) had an idea to sell some watches on the internet. Yes, watches because he thought everybody wear watches so he should have a good market to sell to. Forget about this idea being profitable or not, but lets us focus on the costs for him to start the business. Firstly he went to a web designer to design his website. He spent about $2000 for that.
After that, the web designer advised Tim to get a web hosting account so he can preview his storefront prototype live on the internet. Tim ended up at subscribing to a hosting plan for a year with Lunarpages costing him about $120. Any other web host will cost about the same, be it Hostgator, Godaddy, Bluehost, Hostmonster, iPowerWeb, or PowWeb because 1 year is the shortest period these companies promote and prefer people to pay. Next, Tim hired a web developer who installed an open-source shopping cart, did some customization to fit Tim's business needs and installed the shopping cart on Tim's web hosting service. That was another $3000. Added to that was the payment processor charges like Worldpay setup and miscellaneous integration charges which is about another $700.
To cut the story short, after all the spending, Tim's web store plan did not follow through because he failed to execute the marketing part of the business plan. He spent a total of about $5820. So he lost them all. Luckily his business idea did not involve any stocks to keep.
After sitting down with many e-Commerce startup owners, we came out with these steps to avoid.
13 Checklist to Find the Ideal Shopping Cart Software
These are 13 most important questions you need to ask before you decide on your shopping cart software:
- Find out if you can access your eCommerce Hosting management panel from ordinary browser.
- Find out if you can quickly setup a store within minutes.
- You should be able to quickly setup a store, without the help from web designers, PHP developers or more people. You should be able to upgrade later but you should have the flexibility to start and try now.
- Learn where the majority of top 500 Internet Retailers are.
- Good hosted shopping cart should have a demo. Try a demo first.
- Be sure that the eCommerce Web Hosting is built on good server to ensure reliability.
- No software installation should be required – thus easy to maintain.