Imagine this. You have a small retail business. You want to sell online. You find a website that claims to help you set up an online store. You create an account. You put in your bank information and a merchant account is automatically set up so that as you sell product it deposits in your account. You put in your domain name username/password and your domain is automatically configured to point to your ecommerce site. You can choose from pre-designed templates and change fonts, colors, etc. You can upload your logo. Or you can use HTML/design elements of your own. You create categories and then products and add products to those categories. You can set up cross sell items, discount codes, affiliate programs, integrate with UPS, FedEx, and USPS, and generate all sort of reports. And maybe some other stuff.
How hard do you think it would be to find such a service out there? Well, I haven’t seen it yet.
Granted, there are hundreds of shopping cart/ecommerce providers out there. But let’s take just one as an example of the futility of my search, the Yahoo! Store. Yahoo’s a big company, right? You would expect that if they’re selling an online store it would be pretty easy to use because after all, they’ve got the money to put into developing it the right way, right? Wrong, and not just a little wrong, but very wrong.
I recently tried setting up a Yahoo Store to test out the process. It’s a nightmare. I’ve got a master’s of information systems management and I’ve run a web development firm for six years and I had some serious problems figuring out how to get the thing to work. I finally figured out that a Yahoo Store is nothing like what I described above, although that’s what they lead you to believe.
Once my firm tried to set up shopping cart software from StoreFront.net. Also difficult. Nothing I’ve seen is as easy as it should be, and I can’t figure out for the life of me why there aren’t 500 companies out there with systems that work more or less like what I described in the first paragraph of this post.
If you know of anything else out there that already does this well, please let me know, otherwise I’m going to have to build it myself.
When you find it, or make it, let me know.
I run sbba.com. We help small business owners in the U.S.
I’ve been searching for similar solutions for our customers/members for years. I guarantee if you build it, small business owners will pay for it. Especially if it’s affordable and simple to use. Small business owners simply don’t have the time or expertise to do it themselves. I should contact you about this.
I enjoy your blog.
Have you tried OSCommerce?
It is shareware so it is FREE, which is a huge benefit. It is written in PHP so if you have any knowledge in PHP you can do ANYTHING you want with it. In addition, it has thousands of people running it and developing add-ons as it is open source and does or has something built to do most of what you say.
In addition, there are plenty of free templates available and you just need to drop in your logo image. Shipping modules are built to work with most shipping methods. If they do not come prebuilt, look in the forums.
Sorry, one limitation is no recurring billing.
Hope this helps.
Jay
To play devil’s advocate, free isn’t actually a huge benefit, and just because something is coded in PHP doesn’t mean you can do ANYTHING you want with it. I should probably create a post about this.
I didn’t take an in-depth look at it, but I wasn’t super impressed with what little I saw of it nor the sites built with it. I don’t think it’s close to what I’m looking for. Perhaps it could be customized to provide the functionality I want, but from experience I’m more inclined to build something from the ground up rather than customizing somebody else’s code.
Stumbled upon this site tooling around Google.
You have a good point, there are a lot of claims, but when you look under the dress, you find a lot of weiners…
Our company had an absolute nightmare with Storefront.net and I cannot urge anyone strongly enough to avoid them at all costs. We’ve recently ported to AbleCommerce and thus far have been pleased. It offers quite a bit and although some features could be more robust (and that’s really me being overly picky), it’s a pretty good solution ovrall.