E-Com website recommendations

[GC2012]

I am looking for recommendations for a basic e-commerce website if any one can help?

I have past experience of higher end sites, started with Wordpress and then ended up with Magento in another line of work and ran a large e-com shop but I am looking for something easy to use, customisable and basically plug & play. It will only have about 20-40 products on there, PayPal & V12 for payment options and about 15 orders per month so nothing special. It will basically be there purely for orders and we will drive traffic to the site from other platforms so again we dont need something with hundreds of marketing packages etc.

Having had a look online there seems to be plenty of options from Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and so on.
Wordpress/Woocommerce was good, no real complaints but I am thinking the above options might be easier for a plug and play & managed by a novice!
Shopify seems good but the additional fees seem excessive if you dont use there payment system, our products range from £1000 - £5000+ so the fees could add up.

Wix seems nice and simple, allows PayPal and no additional fees, and about £20 per month.

Is there anyone else I should be looking at?

[haberdashery]

We own a portfolio of sites, some processing tens of thousands of orders per month, others in the thousands, some of the newer ones in the hundreds. All of them are on Shopify or Shopify Plus.

If you sign up for Shopify Payments the payment fees are waived on all payment methods - well they are for us anyway. Plus the Shopify Payments UX is much more favourable than being taken off site with Sage Pay or Worldpay for example.

Possibly the biggest advantage of Shopify is it’s a hosted solution. You don’t need a dev on hand to constantly patch vulnerabilities and you don’t need to maintain your own server or hosting - like you would on Wordpress and other CMS.

Wordpress is essentially a blogging CMS and really isn’t/wasn’t designed for ecommerce. Yes WooCommerce does a job, but it’s not in the same league as Shopify.

Other hosted solutions like Visualsoft are also possible, but I think they’d come in way more expensive than Shopify.

Shopify also has the benefit of the App Store. There’s so many good apps in there that save the time and hassle involved with carrying out tweaks or adding functionality from scratch.

Personally I’d go with the basic Shopify plan and see how you get on.

[chrisparker]

I’ve built a couple for clients and run my own, here are my observations:

Squarespace: Easy to use and set up, can look great if your imagery looks good, and descriptions brief. Perfect for users with little experience, selling items that are based upon looks, rather than content. (I used this for a women’s fashion shop and a design agency website).

Wordpress & Woo. WatchesOfWhitby is built on this, it’s good, and the most flexible option but needs lots of third party plug-ins for functionality, would avoid if you want a simple solution.

Shopify: I chose this for my own e-commerce site. It’s quick and easy to get up and running but has a monthly cost and selling fees which is annoying if you don’t sell much, and it’s not very customisable.

Never used Wix, but if you see a crappy looking website, it’s often built on Wix.

[GC2012]

Thanks guys, I have only heard good things about Shopify to be honest so will look give them a call and see what they can do.

My concern was adding PayPal, who charge about 2% themselves plus a 2% Shopify fee seemed excessive (4% on £1-4k products quickly adds up).

[Captain Morgan]

Not sure if this will help as neither have had a e-commerce aspect but the pair of square space websites I’ve set up are stable and we’re easy to create/admister.

[GC2012]

Not sure if this will help as neither have had a e-commerce aspect but the pair of square space websites I’ve set up are stable and we’re easy to create/admister.

They were one of the companies I shortlisted, they seem reasonable and look okay so I will do a bit more research on them. Thanks