Build Ecommerce Site

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JazzUpYourLife

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Dear all,

I want to build my ecommerce site. I don't have any experience with it and will give it to someone who does and they will do the development back end while I focus on the front end graphic design.

I will also do the initial factfinding so I'd like to know what sort of questions should I be asking, specific to an ecommerce site, to the prospect? I'm panning to use nopCommerce for my ecommerce site. Anyone ever try this CMS? Or it will be better to hire developer?

Any suggestion for ecommerce hosting? What will be the good choice for nopCommerce hosting? I have found several companies that offer nopCommerce. Anyone ever experience with hostforlife.eu? or ukwindowshostasp.net? I see both of them support nopCommerce.

Any feedback is highly appreciated here. Thank you
 
Buddy it is very difficult to make sucessful eCommerce site at the moment, unless you have got lot of money in hand. I'm also struggling entrepreneur been there, done that it is not worth it. There are too many large players in the competition if you want to sell some thing sell it through amazon or flipkart. Just my 2 cents
 
Hi suds,

Thank you for your reply. I'm not going to build ecommerce site like ebay. But, I want to build simple site for my coffee product only.

Thank you
 
^^ Unless OP's is not a routine e-com selling phones to diapers!

Agree with @suds that the e-com space is overcrowded and kinda cannibalistic with Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and eBay out there at the top of the foodchain.

BUT, if your e-com is about something different that these people don't sell or don't sell effectively, maybe you have something on hand that could work. e.g. I know someone who sells Indian tea online (https://www.teabox.com/) and most of his customers are international. They are doing well and have no competition form the apex predators. He has carved out a niche for himself.

As for site-building, I am sure there are quite a few devs on TE itself! Good luck! :)
 
suds said:
Buddy it is very difficult to make sucessful eCommerce site at the moment, unless you have got lot of money in hand. I'm also struggling entrepreneur been there, done that it is not worth it. There are too many large players in the competition if you want to sell some thing sell it through amazon or flipkart. Just my 2 cents
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agree that selling on flipkart & Amazon can get you maximum orders but be careful with their policies and high comissions..
Also these ecommerce sites do prefer buyer. so chances of returned products are very high, even if its not your fault.
 
Thank you for all replies. That's good idea too. But I really want to have ecommerce site that sell my products. So, I wont depends on site like ebay or Amazon to sell my products.
 
My friend to wanted to start one but as said earlier you cannot compete with the biggies. Even if you do they will buy your company for some minor amount and you are left with nothing but forcefully handover them all.
 
nRiTeCh said:
My friend to wanted to start one but as said earlier you cannot compete with the biggies. Even if you do they will buy your company for some minor amount and you are left with nothing but forcefully handover them all.
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How could they force someone to sell their company?
 
nRiTeCh said:
My friend to wanted to start one but as said earlier you cannot compete with the biggies. Even if you do they will buy your company for some minor amount and you are left with nothing but forcefully handover them all.
Click to expand...

Buy your company? I never doubt to sell it if they bid me with high price. :) That's like a dream... hehe.... Who knows?
 
JazzUpYourLife said:
I really want to have ecommerce site that sell my products. So, I wont depends on site like ebay or Amazon to sell my products.
Click to expand...
The problem with your strategy is the cost to get customer on your site is very high. There are two ways to get customer on your site 1) Adwords promotion 2) Organic. 1) Adwords you need to spend money to get users on your site so you need to put money up front no guarantee user will buy from your site. 2) Organic- You need to spend lot of money on SEO to get your site ranked high on google to get organic traffiic. SEO is something in which you have to keep spending money regularly still no grantee that you will get customer on your site.Big giants spend a lots of money on adwords so by default google favours them.

Another big problems is trust issues. When buying from amazon or flipkart we tend to trust more if they are amazon fulfilled or sold by wsretail than sold on site on which we don't know anything, this is true at least for me.
 
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^This. Many people unfortunately think that paying a listing fee to ebay/Amazon is somehow bad and should be free. But they tend to forget the fee on these sites is something which saves you the pain of "acquiring" a customer. If you do it alone, there is a lot of offline/online ads required.
 
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Generic e-commerce sites cannot always meet the needs for specialty products.
Trust can always be built, and a reputation once formed is priceless.

I've never used nopcommerce, but if you're comfortable with it, then go ahead. Initially you can use one of those nopcommerce specialised hosts, but if you do start generating traffic, you'll have to move to a dedicated server later. Get a host that lets you use your own SSL certificate, and not a shared one.

If you're uncomfortable with installing the CMS and migrating it to another machine, then make sure your developer is experienced with both tasks. And make sure that you've got your security in place. With a little effort, you can learn how to do everything yourself.

The only ecommerce CMS's I've tried are Drupal Commerce, and Magento. I preferred Drupal because you get great quality add-ons for free, which would make it easier for you to change your developer down the line. Custom add-ons are great, but may be a pain when you need to upgrade the system, or your old developer quits. For the same reasons it's better to use a tried and tested platform rather than getting someone to code you something new.

Starting your own ecommerce site is easy now-a-days, and you should go ahead and do it. Whether it succeeds or not, the lessons you'll learn will be priceless.
 
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