Wix.com

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FrameMakers

FrameMakers

PFG, Picture Framing God
Joined
Mar 20, 2001
Posts
7,395
Loc
Powell, OH
I am looking to open up a web store with a handful of products. I have started to do a bit of research and am starting to feel a bit overwhelmed. I did stumble across http://www.wix.com. I found a template that I like and their editor seems quite easy to use. They also seem to have a number of tutorials to get me started.

They have an eCommerce option which is pretty reasonable at $16.17 a month. The problem I see is that you can not use a SSL certificate on the sight and it seems that the recommended route is to use paypal and/or google check out. While I always use paypal when it is available, I know many people that would never consider paying with paypal. From what I understand, you can accept credit cards directly through your site, but again not with a SSL certificate.

I have also looked at several others ranging from Amazon to Volusion and find them quite confusing as someone that is not all the familiar with web design.

This is a small project that could grow, but till then I want to try to keep my outlay as low as possible.

Any suggestions as to where to start or where to go?

Thanks
 
Dave,

If you're looking at wix, take a look at Yola.com I'm managing my BIL site there now. I don't remember the particulars and it may have been something as simple as my eyes liked yola better than wix.

If you're gonna only accept PayPal and Google checkout, having your own SSL is not required at all since purchasers are leaving your site and logging into either their PP or Google accounts on secure pages. If you accept credit cards via PP/google applications, you do not need the SSL cert. It's when you use your own merchant account/processor so that the customer doesn't leave your site for payment that you need the cert and also quarterly PCI compliance certificate. It all sounds much worse than it works out to be.

3 years ago, customer payments were 90% traditional CC and 10% PayPal. Today, it's about 55% traditional CC and 45% PayPal. At least for us.

From what I remember, Amazon and Volusion are quite confusing, but when you get into ecommerce that is just a fact of life. Most are complex but not necessarily complicated. There is a learning curve that can be steep.

PCI compliant hosting that includes quarterly and on-demand scans can be obtained for a bit under $10 per month. SSL certs can be found cheap but you're on your own to install them and that can be problematic. That's why I pay more for our SSL certs purchased from our host who takes care of installation and headaches.

Ecommerce applications & Hosting are like framing POS, CMC, etc. Everyone has their preference and everyone's is best.
We have been using zen-cart for 3 years now. It is the ONLY open-source, PCI compliant, ecommerce application. Others certainly will pass the scans but using an out of the box compliant application makes clearing false positives much easer. Also, hosting with a PCI compliant host that is partnered with a PCI ASV (approved scanning vendor) also simplifies matters.

I'm in the process of updating our 2 websites templates to something that is a bit more current but you can follow links to them in my signature line.

Web design is not as difficult as it might sound. Most ecommerce is template driven. Working with a webserver is not much more difficult than dragging/dropping files to an external harddrive. You must remember "BACKUP IS YOUR FRIEND". I have had to use them on many occasions after fatfingering an update and crashing.

Need more info, just ask.
 
Dave,

Another option, if you already have a linux web hosting account for your frameshop is to use ecwid.com.
If you are building a brand new web site you can use ecwid in wordpress

Regards,
Troy
 
Dave,

When looking for places to create my websites I checked out Wix. It seemed pretty straightforward. Like anything I'm sure that there is a learning curve. Compared to others, there was lots of Flash, although they were just getting into html versions for the templates. The sample websites looked amazing. For my purposes, it was a bit "flashy." I don't take orders from my websites so I wasn't concerned with customer payments. I wanted reasonable price, great design and support.
If I did it over again, I would look into Yola for something very simple and straightforward. I ended up using Wordpress.com, which has a huge supportive community. There was a learning curve, but I'm beyond that thank goodness!

Susan
 
troyveluz said:
Dave,

Another option, if you already have a linux web hosting account for your frameshop is to use ecwid.com.

Regards,
Troy
Click to expand...

I'm impressed. TNX for the link Troy. For those who do not need (or want) to process credit cards within their own site and are fine with payment being made offsite, ecwid.com takes much work out of the process.


I didn't realize that Ken Bauer was also an ecommerce guru or I would have pointed you there for more info.
 
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