A sort of plan B

[stacks]

My good lady wife has at last decided that it's time she stopped bleeding me dry and wants to try to do some work herself.

we have a quite a few contacts in the retail industry and she hopes to initially start up an on-line shop which she can run on a part time basis (around the kids school runs) and if all's going well and the figures look good we will look to open up a shop.

So, as I'm in IT I have been assigned to job of figuring out how best to set-up and run an on-line shop!!! Now I deal with websites everyday but not in the sector. Does anyone know of a good off the shelf package that can be bought and easily customised? something that links in with Paypal would be ideal so we don't have the added hassle of setting up our own payment system up front.

I know ebay has it's own "shop" set-up but I'd rather go down the independent route and have a dedicated website.

Any advice appreciated.

[Jog On]

I know of a very good package that does it all - PM me if you need details.

It includes a seriously good keyword research tool, hosting, extensive guides and a step-by-step video guide, tracking and testing and a huge support community.

It's entirely newby friendly and sites built using it do really really well in the search engines. I have one that makes me a few $ a day in Google adsense and the odd affiliate sale. I just bought another one for my main plan B site as well - can't recommend it enough

You can go for a cheap 'get your site up in 30 mins' with cheap hosting etc but if you want it to work you need to do keyword research and traffic building from the start otherwise you won't get any traffic and will probably have to pay for advertising.

[DimPrawn]

I wrote my own from scratch using .NET

In this way it looks a works in a way that fits in with our rather specialist business sector and has some rather nifty back office features.

As for payments, look at Google Checkout, NoChex and PayPal Pro. They are the lowest hassle way of accepting payment online.

HTH

[Shimano105]

sounds like a good .NET learning project to me

[Peoplesoft bloke]

I may be slightly o/t here but I'd be cautious about Paypal in conjunction with credit cards (and possibly the others - but Paypal's the one I know about). You take a risk that payments are funded from stolen or dodgy cards and you also risk that "customers" may complain to their card company that goods or faulty or haven't been received. If this happens, you can be out of pocket through no fault of your own.

[DimPrawn]

I may be slightly o/t here but I'd be cautious about Paypal in conjunction with credit cards (and possibly the others - but Paypal's the one I know about). You take a risk that payments are funded from stolen or dodgy cards and you also risk that "customers" may complain to their card company that goods or faulty or haven't been received. If this happens, you can be out of pocket through no fault of your own.

That pretty much applies to all merchant accounts. The customer is always right when they pay by card.

Saying that I had no problems and I've taken several hundred thousand pounds through both NoChex and PayPal Pro.

[TheFaQQer]

OS Commerce is free and does pretty much what you need, I think.

[Cheshire Cat]

eBay

HTH

[Marina]

Saying that I had no problems and I've taken several hundred thousand pounds through both NoChex and PayPal Pro.

CHOKE! Sorry - lost some coffee up my nose there. Did you start by typing "several hundred pounds", then change your mind and intend to put "several thousand pounds"?

[DimPrawn]

CHOKE! Sorry - lost some coffee up my nose there. Did you start by typing "several hundred pounds", then change your mind and intend to put "several thousand pounds"?

No. No.