Setting up a website to sell wide variety of items - best options?

[tankman1989]

I need to be able to list my computer, electronics and other things I sell, much of it is unique or on-off's for the site, so I don't have multiples in stock. Maybe 10% now and moving to about 20% will be repeat offerings.

i'm looking into trying to sell on either ebay, amazon or Newegg marketplace (other suggestions welcome - possibly Etsy for some things).

I want to show detailed images, descriptions and may be video of the items I'm selling and I guess it would be ideal to be able to set up the site to process sales if that is easy enough, bu that doesn't need to come immediately.

It's been about 3-4 years since I tried setting up an e-commerce site and I ran into roadblocks and it was a major headache. I'd prefer a free option as I don't have a lot of items to sell (probably about 100-200 ATM)

I do have a web hosting service (needs to be re-evaluated as it is a 15 year old plan) and see what else is available, though it seems a good deal IMO.

I've tried wordpress (never got far with these after the base install, then adding the themes and everything else just gets me stuck). I've tried Magento and Joomla and they were a little difficult for myu experience level.

i'd be willing to learn some CMS program as there are a few projects I want to work on that will use this but I don't know what to choose and it gets so confusing reading them and listening to reviews (they all state they are the best - meaning the user reviews). So I'm looking for some tech experts here to chime in if possible.

Thanks a lot! Take care all and happy new year!

 

[sapphirescales]

Magento is an extremely powerful ecommerce platform, but I only recommend it if you're going to have a massive collection of products (5,000+). It's difficult to learn and not at all user friendly.

I recommend checking out WooCommerce. I set up WooCommerce based ecommerce websites for clients all the time. It's easy to learn and there are a lot of themes available to make designing it easy. My personal website uses WooCommerce and although I have a lot of products (over 2,000 so far) it's been great. One thing I will say about WooCommerce though, it requires a lot more power server-side compared to some lighter ecommerce solutions so make sure you're not on $5/month GoDaddy hosting or something if you want to have a fast, responsive site.

It's also important that you check the speed of whatever theme you plan on using. Some themes are coded inefficiently and although they look good, they'll tank your site's performance no matter how good your hosting is. Remember, it's not just your hosting that determines the speed of your website, but also the speed of your client's computer and internet connection. If you're loading a 6MB page on a 8Mbps connection, it will take 6 seconds to load (at best). Ideally your site should load in 2-3 seconds. If it takes longer than that, you can lose up to 50% of your audience due to impatience. You need to factor in where you live in this. If you're in a smaller town where a lot of people still have DSL, then you need to really scale back your website and make speed your #1 priority. If most people in your area have a 2Mbps connection speed, your homepage can be (at MOST) 512KB if you want it to load in 2-3 seconds. That's really small, and I still recommend a fast host to minimize bottlenecks.

 

[Mick]

I've used OSCommerce for several sites with reasonable success. @sapphirescales is right though - bandwidth can be a killer with some of these things. But with not that many items to sell, it may not be a problem - you won't have a huge DB to rummage through every time a query is executed.

 

[Your PCMD]

What about OpenCart? Or, CubeCart?

If you have just a handful of things to sell, you could just use simple PayPal buttons, or, use PayPal Shopping Cart, JCart, or check CodeCanyon.

I use Opencart. Its a learning curve, but is lite on server resources and has good customization if you know a bit of HTML. But great out of the box. There are free themes for it as well.

 

[fencepost]

Is this ongoing sales as in you plan to stock these particular items and have them available for sale, or is this a one-time selling of stuff you have?

There are a ton of options out there for setting up online storefronts, what you might be best off doing is getting the names of a few then looking at their training videos either on their site or on Youtube. Along with giving you some idea of what's going to be involved in setting up for each, it should give you some idea of what kind of regular maintenance will be required and what kind of time commitment you're looking at. Don't automatically go for the free solution - find out first whether it's free because it takes management time (unless you purchase the subscription version that automates things).

 

[maclaptech]

I would use WP with Woocommerce and Cloudflare service. Siteground hosting is a great option to host your site and affordable. Cloudflare makes you site very fast.

 

[DataMedics]

+1 for WooCommerce and Siteground hosting. There's a bit of a learning curve to set up WooCommerce in the beginning, but it's got some great features like being able to push out your listings to ebay and keep your site/ebay inventory synced.

 

[hondablaster]

Woocommerce for wordpress is the best option as both a starter ecommerce platform and for a more seasoned e-commerce user. Shopify and others can also be really great, but since you're a tech overcoming the learning curve of WC shouldn't be that bad and it gives you the flexibility of choosing a host and payment gateway. I think Shopify possibly allows you to get up and running faster but I think its also more expensive to maintain and grow. Most successful shops are WC and Shopify. (although I have been out of the loop for some time)

I generated over 1 million dollars in gross sales using woocommerce, so I can verify first hand it works. Don't be afraid to buy plugins, the people I notice who fail, want free and cheap everything and their ecommerce site reflects this in both UI, aesthetics and speed.

Goodluck.