Need a free online shop, any suggestions?

[Rob_B]

My wife is setting up a very small scale 'business' and we want a site to do it all for us. It'll be a few pages of pics/info on the products then a shop to buy them (approx 4 products with varying colours per item)

We've looked at 'Webs' which offers what we need but a whopping 100mb bandwidth so that's a non-starter.
I've come across http://www.shopcreator.com/index.html - seems to be unlimited bandwidth, just pay a 5.5% fee (under £500 of sales) per month, problem is it looks a bit too simple & the support forums are bare so does that mean they're crap or that no-one has any problems?!

I realise if sales exceeded a few hundred then we may be better of elsewhere & actually buying a domain/ecommerce from someone like 123reg but we have no idea of the interest this will get so don't want to shell out and it not work out.

Help!

[stytagm]

Hi Rob,

It's a difficult problem very low scale e-commerce, the problem is that payments are hard to set up and/or really expensive.

There are a few free open-source shop platforms out there if you're prepared to get your hands dirty, such as http://www.opencart.com/ or http://www.zen-cart.com/ (php) or http://dashcommerce.org/ (.Net - so hosting is more expensive).

Like you say there are hosted ones out there, http://www.shopify.com gets mentioned a lot, but I'm not sure how good they'd be for a UK business.

In an emergency, if you just want to get trading, there's always ebay shops. A few small retailers I've bought from have a static website that does the marketing, and then redirects to an ebay store to do the selling. It's cheap to set up and if you find you're selling well, you can always use your newly earned zillions to pay for a shiny dedicated shop later on.

Cheers - Andrew.

[bobbyzero]

I've used Zen cart for an online shop doing decent traffic, it's massively complicated and probably overkill for what you want.

Have you considered using Paypal's shopping cart system? You just set up a page with links they provide for you, and it all links off to their site where they do all the hard work. These guys are doing it that way for a mid-sized shop.

[scaryjim]

Personal opinion is that an ebay shop is the easiest way to go. The real question is how many of your potential customers would be put off from being redirected to an ebay shop!

I have at least one acquaintance that runs a small business selling stuff online - I'll check what she uses (she's not technical at all so the system she uses must be pretty easy to set up and maintain).

[Rob_B]

Thanks for your suggestions guys, I'd like to avoid the ebay route, I don't trust them/Paypal at all and the fees are obscene. I'm wondering how I could setup it using Paypal (when they unrestrict my account after doing so for an undisclosed reason!) but using the gift option to avoid their fees, I imagine that you can't due to the way it's setup.

[bobbyzero]

To be fair to them, Paypal fees aren't much different to most card handling fees charged by banks. It's only when they double-dip with ebay fees as well that it gets obscene!

[Rob_B]

Well, decided to go with Paypal as it's customisable & (for now) cheap n cheerful!

My problem is now that I'm using free online sites & trying to insert a 'add to cart' button but the site I was using is flash so that won't work, are there any suggestions for free hosts that aren't flash but have reasonable bandwidth? Currently using viviti but my wife has pointed out that it doesn't give a very catchy URL!

Thanks again guys!