I want to open an online store with handcrafted items. What advice can anyone give me? Esp. on these Issues:?
Question:
What can you tell me about:
A shopping cart system (I don't want to pay someone thousands to set this up I heard the people at threadless coded their own am I crazy to consider this?),
Yahoo geocities hosting,
Security
Inventory (software? or setup, etc) (I want my site to show how many of a certain item is left and say sold out, back ordered, and email customers when an item is back in stock, etc & also to have a way to view stock myself)
wishlist and user accounts, tell a friend
payment (how to accept credit cards other than paypal, etc)
statistics (analysis) performance, etc
Health Insurance
Business/sales/etc Licenses
any other (good) advice is appreciated
I want something (sort of) like The glitter workshop's online Store
or Fred Flare (only smaller)
Answer:
If you hire a website designer to create your website, it will be very pricey. May I suggest that you get your own Domain name through www.GoDaddy.com (under $10 each name per year) and than use www.LowPriceBuilder.com to create your web site.
I use http://www.LowPriceBuilder.com for few years. They only charge flat price, ($15 per month) ,and include Web hosting, Shopping Cart system, 30 more functions.. etc. This would be the most inexpensive way to have your e-commerce web site to go online. The builder allows you to create your web page easily without knowledge of coding or programming language.
Judging by your question, you are novice to ecommerce, so instead of trying to run a web-site(with all its problems, SSL formats and all that crap) then marketing your web-site etc. Simply open an ebay store and try it out if it works then you can slowly ease into a web based business. Good luck!
Well you can go to http://www.theexpomart.com from where you can get your own ecommerce enabled online store for free plus they also give you free hosting etc. You get your own admin panel from where you can manage your website. Check them out it may help.
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