Should I pay for a e-commerce solution or use a free one ?
With so many free shopping carts available why should you pay for one? To put it simply, you get what you pay for and most “free” shopping carts cost more in technical support that a service like CoreCommerce. I think Magento (the world’s most complicated ecommerce solution) put it best themselves, when warning you not to use the free edition
… is recommended for expert developers and highly technical enthusiasts and hobbyists in non-mission critical environments. As this edition is unsupported it is intended to be used by those happy to spend time and resource solving issues independently
The only reason to use a free shopping cart i f you are capable of writing one yourself but just don’t have the time. That may sound snobby and elitist – but stop and do the math. BigCommerce and CoreCommerce cost $25 a month. Let’s say on average that a web developer charges $60 an hour – how much help, support and training can you get for $25 a month. Any paid shopping cart will support you at no additional charge, they have complete systems setup (including forums and live chat) to ensure you get the best out of there products.
Yes the free shopping carts have forums and user groups – but neither of these is as useful as picking up the phone and asking for technical support now is it?
Am I anti-open source? Of course not, but I’m a programmer I can deal with open source, I can research solutions, read code, install and configure – I don’t have to pay someone large sums of money to maintain and teach me to use “free” software. Can you?
Is it ever feasible to use a free shopping cart?
No not really. You are just setting yourself up for expensive technical help and headaches. Sure there are rare exceptions, but give me any open source cart and I will convert it to a commercial platform and increase ROI threefold.
So how cheaply can I get into ecommerce?
Using a service like Volusion, CoreCommerce or BigCommerce you can expect to pay approximatley
Setup fee: $50 – shop around occasionally various vendors waive this fee
SSL Security Certificate: $80 – essential to establish trust and for credit card processing
First months fee: $25
Merchant facilities: $20 a month – you need to accept credit cards if you want to succeed
Not out of reach by any stretch $130 dollar in getting setup and $45 a month will have a good looking, professional shopping cart capable of bringing you in a sustainable income.
Thanks to David for triggering this rant.
No related posts.
Nicely put, Andrew.
OK, so we have 2 Volusion stores and I just feel like all our eggs are in that basket – Andrew is there any way around that with these shopping cart providers? Is it better to split it up and NOT go with a one stop solution? Like have a site developed, host it at Rackspace or something ourselves, do our own marketing through somewhere like Constant Contact? If Volusion continues in their denial of problems, we get screwed right away – they only die one customer at a time.
Yikes – V (Volusion) is just getting worse. Just tried to call V support – “you are caller #7″ which means at least 30 minutes – Live chat you can get right through – the problem is live chat NEVER solves anything. Andrew – do you feel it is worth the money to go to a developer for something like Magento or another OS type?
If you are spending money, look into Interspire, it is cheaper than Magento and very easy to use. It might get you back on track
Hi Andrew:
Thanks for the great E-Commerce blog and advice. One question though – are there any good solutions for a Non-Ecommerce site? For example, we want a nice website that will be mostly information and where people can download things and interact, but we really won’t be selling anything – think Yelp! or something like that? Are there solutions for something like that?
WordPress is a good starting point but depending on exactly what you want you might be better without a CMS or similar and just get a custom application created in PHP or Rails.
To get off the ground fast and cheap though WordPress is a great help
Good article!
We’ve learned this the hard way. I used to work as a developer, so when I opened my own business I figured running the store and server shouldn’t be that hard. As you grow, you really don’t have time for it. Even with our small operation I’m too busy to maintain the server and write back end code. I’d rather spend those hours doing sales calls, making design improvements, or working on the business, rather than in it.
It’s not feasible to hire a developer to support your store either. For 50$ a month you have an entire team of people on the other side supporting your business software. When you weight the ‘free’ versus the paid, the free always seems to end up more expensive in the long run.