Alternative low budget E-commerce options
We don't want to propose a solution to you that is out of step with your current status, aspirations, budget. A fully featured ecommerce web site usually costs thousands of pounds. That does represent good value and is far less than the cost with setting up a high street shop - consider the hundreds of pounds a month rental, staff, rates, heating, shopfitting, advertising. However even the much lower cost of an ecommerce site may represent an obstacle if you are on a tight budget. So what are the alternatives? There are many and if you'd like we can explain the relative advantages and disadvantages of each. In summary we think the middle way is the worst mixture of compromises and cost. If you can't afford the best choose the simplest cheapest alternative as a way of doing some "market testing", if that's a success then you'll have the confidence to invest in a better system.
eBay can provide a useful starting point for ecommerce if you can spare the time it needs. eBay's transaction fees are comparatively high and you may be competing with many other sellers forcing you to accept lower prices but there is less up front setup cost. Even if you are quite good with computers you may find it takes more time than you might like to develop your understanding of how eBay works and setting up your products.
Some of our ecommerce customers also continue to offer eBay as "a second route to market" alongside their ecommerce site, when you ship an eBay order you can enclose details of your eCommerce site and they may buy direct in future.
If you have a fairly small product set we can just integrate PayPal payment functionality to a "conventional" web site.
PayPal fees are comparatively high but it's easy to get started and it's a widely recognised payment mechanism so represents a good starting point. If sales go well in future you should switch to an alternative with lower running costs.
Some alternatives are entirely web-based with the technical complexities being dependent on a third party, on their software and on their server. The pricing models seem very attractive at first glance but of course there are disadvantages. The first one you will encounter is that you have to operate their way, there is little flexibility, that's part of the price you pay for simplicity. There are a number of other issues such as the ability for your product to be found on Google and whether Google associates the product with your own domain name or with that of the online shop provider. You may find there is a raft of priced add-ons (some you will need, some you won't but they may pressure-you to believing you do) and you may find the supplier takes a significant slice of your profit.
We were approached by a retailer asking for help when such a provider had ceased trading, taking off-line hundreds of hours' effort inputting product images, descriptions etc. We do have ways of recovering "deleted" websites in some instances but this time there was no way to recover any of it. All the customer had on his PC was a folder of product images. With Actinic YOU hold a complete copy of your website on YOUR office PC. If the server were to become unavailable you could simply upload the site elsewhere. (You must ensure you keep backup copies too in case your PC has a problem, Actinic includes a backup module and will prompt you to take backups.)