Hi All,

My name is Steve, and I write you from a large gunstore in the northern wastes of Canada. I really, really need some input on what our business should be doing in terms of our website.

Right now, we are running a half-arsed wordpress site that was setup by a local guy. It's somehow fallen on me to maintain it, and I am feeling more and more like this guy has kind of scammed us a little. WP does not fit the needs we have, and he seems to be unwilling to provide any kind of support or take any of the issues with it seriously. I've spent most of my free time learning HTML and am getting into CSS in order to make this site look halfway professional.

I've determined that it might be easier to just start from scratch with a proper hosting company and format than to put any more time into trying to fix this mess. We look like a kid's attempt at a storefront, not a $7 million a year net national firearms distributor.

So, I need some input. Here's the ideal criteria:

1. Must be cheap. My bosses do not feel computers are worth anything for a business, and it took much cajoling on the part of my "webmaster" predecessor to even get this website up. I feel I could maybe get them to drop $50 a month on this, maximum.

2. Must be capable of supporting some kind of actual ecommerce - as far as I can tell, WP does not allow good integration of PayPal or similar, and this is a major thing to my employers.

3. Must be able to integrate with Sage Business Vision or BVEssentials, or have some form of inventory tracking system. We have roughly 2 million UPCs to keep track of, and while only a fraction of those will be represented on the website, I am expected to put in 6 days a week as a salesman as well as keep the website up to date. The more automation possible here, the better.

4. Must be programmable in CSS or HTML 4/5. I will not be paid to learn a new language and do not intend to put all my free time into learning a new language.

5. Must be smart phone compatible. Our current site is not despite it being 2015.

6. Ideally, the site design itself could be done by the hosting company, with myself only having to upload inventory and pictures and the like.

I think that pretty much covers what we'd need. I've done a little independent research, but it seems as though most ecommerce hosts that advertise charge based on number of items for sale, and this will not fly with the bosses. I am pretty horribly out of my depth here and (if you couldn't tell) kind of frustrated with this, but feel I could convince my employers of the benefits of a new setup if I could present them with a proper plan.

You can see the current site here:

http://corlanes.com/

And here is what I am expected to make it look like/an end result everyone would be happy with:

http://store.prophetriver.com/

Any input at all would be really, really appreciated.

- Steve
Senior Salesman/Beleaguered Webmaster
Corlane Sporting Goods