[kapi]

Hi, I'd like to ask some advice from many of the seasoned web developers.

I have been doing web design for three years now but have no real experience in ecommerce because the company I work for has a simple brochure site that runs of a mySQL database.

My question is this, if I go freelance what are the best options for small to medium businesses to sell online? I have done large amounts of research relating to merchant accounts and ecommerce cms. I tend to code by hand and wanted to use something like ECWID for any potential customers but am unsure.

What do you all use for your customers? What is the best approach to get involved in the ecommerce side of things.

I feel kind of silly as I went to uni for web design but they never did ecommerce, I guess they thought they should concentrate on site design rather than the finance side of things.

Any advice would be most welcome. . . Thanks

[Waldemar B.]

Hi Kapi, what market are you planning to tap into? The fastest way to start online is to market other peoples products, since then you don't need to make them and you hardly need a website either. This is called affiliate marketing. What you need to do, is to pick a good product and then write a free report and start driving traffic to that report. Inside, you then connect to the affiliate product. That's the fastest way to start marketing. In this dield, you usually get 50% per sale. If you do want to make your own products, then you need a sales page and then you drive traffic to that page. You can use Pay Pal as a payment solution. There's much more to be said on this subject from my 7 years marketing online, but whatever you do, I suggest you find a market first - then create the product.

[BlueDreamer]

Ecommerce is a huge subject and covers everything from simple Paypal buy buttons to huge expensive online systems. Also "ecommerce" doesn't necessarily mean anyone actually buys online, for instance I can order a Dominos pizza online but pay in cash when it's delivered.

For the most part though, most "ecommerce" sites tend to be based on pre-made shopping cart CMS's of which there are literally hundreds of system available (probably thousands by now!) from very basic to very complex and to suit nearly any purpose. The majority use some sort of templating system which you can modify to your hearts content.

A good start would be to visit somewhere like http://www.hotscript...shopping-carts/ and take a look to see some that are available.

There is no "best" option since each site/business will have it's own needs. You'll see some names banded about frequently but just because something is popular it doesn't necessarily mean it will be right for your client, so doing some background work to choose the right solution is always advised.

Myself? I've used Jshop for many years when it suits, fortunately it tends to suit most of my clients so rarely need other solutions, apart from that I normally go for an Expressionengine based site.

This post has been edited by BlueDreamer: 16 August 2011 - 06:02 PM

[mcampbell]

I have to agree that there is a big space of ideas if you want to talk about e-commerce but choosing which one would best suit you, should be your first step. I mean, you should know what you want to do.

Do you sell your own, for higher return; or sell other's products, from which you will get some kind of commission? You have to ponder upon yourself first before you decide how to sell them.

[Renaissance-Design]

All depends on the job.

For a full-fat ecommerce site where selling product is the main concern, I tend to use Magento. For adding product sales to a content-based site, there ae ecommerce plugins for most of the major CMS'.