Newbie Here - Best HOSTED Solution for my needs?
Hi everyone....what a great, and active forum....I've only barely been browsing and I know I found a goldmine....I'm hoping you guys can help.
After scouring around and looking at different Open Source options, with no coding knowledge, thinking I'd learn HTML, PHP and CSS, I've decided that it's going to be way too much work, and I've basically sold myself on a hosted solution at this point, because of the all-in-one functionality and ease of customization.
I'm asking for you guys to help me with your experience to determine the best one. I spent about 30 minutes on the Network Solutions (formerly MonsterCommerce) hands on demo and thought it was REALLY nice, and poked around on the 3DCart demo, which looked to be packed with features, so much that I got a little overwhelmed and realized I could spend days on demos, so that's why I'm coming here to ask some expert advice.
Somebody posted a really nice review site of the hosted solutions (and thanks for that) - I haven't dug through it yet, but it looks very thorough, although I don't trust review sites too much because there always seems to be an agenda behind them - just glancing at that one it looks like "goEmerchant" funded the site (only one w/a video review?! hmmm)
This is what I'm looking for, although my needs are subject to change as I learn more, this is what is most important to me right now
1.) Maximum EASE and options for customization......I want to be able to design my site to look exactly how I want it to look down to all of the details
2.) SEO....I want a site that TRULY offers top SEO rankings, they ALL say they do
3.) Analytics.....I'd like strong analytics as I feel this is key (is google analytics the answer for this, or do some hosted solutions offer superior analytics tools?)
4.) Overall feature set....I don't want to choose a solution only to find it limits me down the road
Lastly, what about ProStores specifically, the Ebay company? I have an Ebay store now and am naturally looking at taking the next step.......I found some old reviews that completely trashed ProStores, but perhaps they've made strides??.......however, judging by how clunky and annoying Ebay is, not to mention their stupid HTML editor, I wouldn't be surprised if it was junk, but with a powerseller discount it's only $20/mo.
Thanks a bunch....assuming you made it all the way through this post - sorry it's so long!! :o
Prioritize for good results
If you want to design your site, for visual impact, and you are not a developer, then you will have to hire a third party party to do it for you and it will be expensive. No template is going to be completely customizable. Also I will warn you of the great beginner's mistake - and we all make it - for ecommerce, if your goal is to make money, the visual part is the least important. Customers like several things. First the like pages to load fast - so avoid a lot of images or large images - second they like to find what they are looking for fast -- that's navigation and organization - third - reading on a monitor is strain so simple easy to read text with neutral backgrounds are best for business.
You will find all the good carts are designed with the shopper in mind. So the features will be there.
Prostores are not a good cart, they are really great if you have a big store on ebay and you want to do something off of ebay, and that's what they were designed for, and they are owned by ebay.
3dcart is very good and economical. You dont have to use all the features of course but it is something that can be expanded easily. It is similar to Volusion but Volusion has a lot more free good looking templates. However, Volusion is a lot more complicated to use in the backend.
For SEO, all of these have a lot of good features but in my mind the best cart is SEO-cart, which generates real html pages, and that is something you don't see anywhere else. Others are dynamically generated fake html pages and they are not as good for organic search. SEO-cart also has auto-generated meta tags which are a huge help. If you don't get traffic nobody is going to see your nice looking site.
This is a cart whre you will need them to design a template for you so you will have control over the look but it costs money.
3dcart, Volusion, a lot of others you have the use of free templates -and all of these are customizable and you can make changes with freelancers.
If you want something quick and easy and with most of these SEO features I like quickcart - which offers a free indefinite trial - and is very low cost also about twenty dollars a month to start. This means you can build your store until it's done and you're happy with it and take as long as you want.
SEO-cart also is very strong in the back end, and it's very easy to understand and intuitive and it's the best for dealing with options and images I think.
however, unless you want to spend money on programming, you will not get everything in one package, just remember that the point here is to sell something, not to look at it. Design mostly applies to things like - how many links on your pages have key words that people are looking for.
I have run trials on just about everything out there. I now have a site with over 5,000 items on it and we export to amazon, buy.com, sortprice, etc. -- but if I had to do it over again I would definately go SEO-cart jsut because it has the most SEO features and if you're going through the effort you might as well have the maximum impact from your work online.
