eCommerce website

[Dorkeaux]

Hey Peeps,

I don't know why I didn't think to ask here sooner.

I belong to a club that meets annually.
Lots of optional paid events and a little merch.

We need a website that can do the following:

• Be inexpensive.
• Be spun up for 2 months a year, then made dormant. For cost purposes. There will be no requirement for activity outside the 2 month window.
• Host pictures and text about events, mainly boilerplate.
• Maintain a small product catalogue, and a basket paradigm. Typical eCommerce site.
• Accept payments by Visa/Mastercard at least. Many, many currencies.
• Not take a fortune in payment processing nor exchange fees.
• Optionally handle multiple languages.
• Have a box to send messages to the admin.
• Not take a lot of my valueable time to code. An OOB solution would be great.

I've done a little research, and the kickers seems to be the ability to go dormant and unhosted for most of the time, and the massive payment processing and currency exchange fees.

Any thoughts?

[malvolio]

Hey Peeps,

I don't know why I didn't think to ask here sooner.

I belong to a club that meets annually.
Lots of optional paid events and a little merch.

We need a website that can do the following:

• Be inexpensive.
• Be spun up for 2 months a year, then made dormant. For cost purposes. There will be no requirement for activity outside the 2 month window.
• Host pictures and text about events, mainly boilerplate.
• Maintain a small product catalogue, and a basket paradigm. Typical eCommerce site.
• Accept payments by Visa/Mastercard at least. Many, many currencies.
• Not take a fortune in payment processing nor exchange fees.
• Optionally handle multiple languages.
• Have a box to send messages to the admin.
• Not take a lot of my valueable time to code. An OOB solution would be great.

I've done a little research, and the kickers seems to be the ability to go dormant and unhosted for most of the time, and the massive payment processing and currency exchange fees.

Any thoughts?

I used Freeola.com for this kind of thing. Get the domain from them and the very basic website hosting and email is free. They also have a fairly good site builder, which might include most if not all of your requirement. There are bolt-ons as needed for the ore complex requirements, but they aren't expensive. They don't care if it gets zero traffic!

Failing that, talk to your local college. They tend to have a lot of webbies looking for experience.

[courtg9000]

WordPress with the WooCommerce plugin perhaps? Use Stripe for payments. Hosting shouldn't cost too much per annum.

[openstrike]

To pay for 2 months' hosting at a stretch, consider a VM/VPS from your favourite cloud provider. They should be happy to power it down and store an image/snapshot for 10 months for a minimal fee.

I've had pretty good experience using Nochex for payment processing via their gateway. Takes away all the PCI-DSS hassles from me and just works. It's not cheap on a per-transaction basis so YMMV on that, but there's no up-front or ongoing fees otherwise.

[Dorkeaux]

Thanks everyone. Very useful.