Andrii

3 months ago I decided to give Bigcommerce a chance, had a job designing a website for selling software licenses. It was far from easy to do since its not boxed products that are being sold but licenses them selves. Since I've started working with Bigcommerce I started noticing small problems, like the fact that I didnt have an option of displaying SKUs under the product boxes (had to fix that with JS) or the lack of decent looking layouts. Im still learning web development and Bigcommerce seemed to provide a lot of help at the beginning but it turns out I have to do most of the work my self. The template they provide are terrible most are duplicated with different colours. Not only the that but the code it self is messy and some even contain errors from the start. The slide-show I had to recode fully my self because because the loading speed of the slide-show would slow down the main paid loading speed to 3-4 seconds on a really fast internet so you can imagine it on the slow one. One of most annoying things is their Search. It does not provide filters or even correct results and often leaves customers going through 5-6 pages of results looking for the correct one. I've contacted Bigcommerce about this and they suggested SearchSpring, a 3rd party search app which does everything Bigcommerce should be doing from the beginning. Since they said this is the only option I contacted SearchSpring and they quoted me the monthly fee of £100 based on a low estimated traffic (100 unique visitors a day), the fee ofcourse will go up once you start gaining more traffic. Bigcommerce of course get a great % of that since they are upselling these services to everyone. Bigcommerce works on a principal of "Oh something doesnt work on the platform? theres an app for that!" for which you have to pay of course. The platform has ridiculous number of limitations, no access to PHP, NO in-house charging system, no decent customer support, as any other Bigcommerce customer will know if you have an issue you should probably search on their forum for a solution or post it on IDEAS page where they will make to ignore it. The number of problems goes on. But i would love to hear what you guys think! Did any of you had experience with Bigcommerce? Is there a better eCommerce platform that you can recommend? The website that i created is http://www.licenses-direct.com/ would be great to hear what you guys think about the website as well? Any changes?

BlueDreamer: searchspring would be great but they will completely **** my budget. They created this formula which takes your views and search query and times it by a fix rate, basically they will charge me around £100/$150 per month. So im assuming if my views go up the price will go up as well, im in the process of find a more permanent solution.

Thanks for your help everyone, My marketing budget is £20 or $30-35 a day, But after reading all the feedback I think i will pause with marketing and focus on fixing the website a little, My plan right now is to: Start selling on different sites like Amazon and Ebay, not to make money of them but hopefully it will bring some trust into the business There is only so much I can do when it comes to designing the website, Software licenses are not easy to list, for example if you go on my website and search for "word" you will get atleast 40-50 results and they are more or less correct, the products are the same but the license is different i.e. Corporate/Academic/Government or Open Business/Open Value/OVS/OVP the list goes on and im sure you get the point. The ideal thing for my website in my opinion is to create a search wizard like the one Autotrader.com has for cars. OR maybe instead of having a multiple products listed based on their license type, have it as an option on the product it self. That would be a great idea if it was only so easy, my cart provider is Bigcommerce and im not sure if you guy aware of this but their platform sucks. They have an option to create different options for the products but I need it to also change the Details of the product as you change the option like SKU, Name so on. If anyone has any idea on how I can list these or create the search wizard that would be amazing, even some source material or tutorials would be a massive help

Thanks for you feedback guys, I've added trust badges and some links to the social network, hopefully that will reflect some trust upon the website. Now regarding the website design, the website it self serves and an archive of software licenses, these are completely different from the ones you would get from the amazon. Thus the reason our target audience are small business-big companies. To create this website I've used Bigcommerce and to be honest they are pretty terrible, the search bar is full of errors, you cant do in-house payments and the design is very limited so for now i will have to work with what I have. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can improve the design of the website i.e. change colors, fonts, layout or just delete the whole thing.. Another thing I wanted to ask is what is the best way to advertise to small business. From what I was suggested so far, google ads will be a waste of money and most likely wont help my website sales at all. Bing is a good option since their users are aged 25-50. And other this i was suggested was to go on the businesses websites, find they email addressed and more or less spam them directly. Would do you guys think about this or do you have better suggestions? Thanks for your feedback again, anymore comments are more than welcome

I heard this is a great place to get some feedback which is exactly what i need right now, i have a website selling software licenses, www.licenses-direct.com The website has been around for a month and a website its not doing too bad: Visitors- 50-70 a day woorank- 60% Bounce rate- 58% Average pages per visit - 4 Even average visit duration is 6 minutes But as a business its failing. I've literally have no sales so far. Is this normal for eCommerce site? should i change something about the website? maybe someone knows any marketing techniques that might help me?