How do I setup an online store ?

[lcschung]

My friend and I are trying to setup a online store to sell wedding gifts, but we got the following questions:

1) Is there any site that allow people to build an online store (including shopping cart) quickly ? (I've checked out Amazon Webstore, Paypal checkout)

2) My friend's company is in Asia, if we sell our products online, what's the best way to deal with Canada tax ? (e.g. Do I need to register a company in Canada?)

Any other tips are much appreciated !

Thanks,

Andy

[george benjamin]

http://mashable.com/2007/08/09/online-business/

Go to "Money Making & eCommerce Solutions"

[fac3less]

Andy,

There's no 'easy build' store that I'm aware of, but there's a few free 'store' scripts that you can install on any hosting provider to get started.

Here's a few:
http://zencart.com/
http://oscommerce.com/

Either script will allow you to setup a pretty basic storefront. You'll need a web hosting provider & a domain name to go with it though!

As far as company registration, I'd recommend chatting with a lawyer or doing some googling first.

Enjoy! :)

[kingkao]

There is one easy way to setup your own store.
www.shopify.com
You can try it out for free to see the different templates and stuff.

[espanolguy]

www.kyozou.com has an awesome e-commerce solution....

[lcschung]

Thanks everyone.

I actually found an alternative. www.guru.com.

It allows you to post your project up and freelace consultants from all over the world can bid on your project. So you get free quote and have no obligation to hire.

I posted my project and get 12 bids proposal from $150 - $1000. Of cuz companies from India and China are much cheaper.

So since I dun have time to code it myself, this seems like a good solution for me. Will see how it works out.

Andy

[fac3less]

Just be very careful about tossing money outside the borders, if you don't end up with anything in return -- well, you have no legal ground.

Best of luck with the project!

[cdnNick]

Report back how it goes. I've had some decent experiences with elance.com but never tried guru.com.

[lcschung]

It has been a good experience so far .... Here's how it works:

1) I posted the project description on guru.com
2) People can bid on my project for a period of 30 days
3) I can decide to close the bid at anytime
4) I choose to award the project to a guy in India for $150
5) I send him my customer requirement document
6) He'll need to send me a project agreement through guru.com and a fund request
7) I deposit the fund into the guru.com account and he starts the work
8) Based on the project plan, the work will be delivered in a week with a demo and then an installation
9) When I am happy with the work, I request guru.com to release the fund
10) Otherwise there are other ways for you to settle the case

So finger crossed, let's hope it works out.

Andy

[Realrena]

good luck

[lcschung]

Hi everyone,

Just want to provide an update with my experience from guru.com.

It WORKS ! =) Today my new site sweetweddingfavor.com (http://www.sweetweddingfavour.com) is officially launched !

We believe wedding favours could be fun, creative and yet affordable. Why spend the money on something that you know your guest will throw it away (or worst case, we have seen people leaving the wedding favours on the wedding table). We hope we can offer people with something different and special, and most important, that the guest will bring the favour home with a smile on the face =)

If you are looking for wedding favours, or know something who's engaged, or you simply want to receive one of our sweet favours in their wedding, please pass this on for us !

Simply send us your question or feedback to hello@sweetweddingfavor.com and we will offer you a discount coupon code for up to 15% off.

Back to my guru.com experience, so after two weeks of demo, testing and some rework, they install the code on my site and have the database setup. I am happy, and then I release the fund deposit request. And if you are not happy with the work, there's way to settle for refund with guru.com, so your money is safe.

With the amount of money that I spent on this eCommerce site, I would say it is one of the money well spent in my business, and I would recommend this to everyone. One catch tho, I have heard bad experience from it as well, so I would suggest breaking down your project into little pieces and post it there to diversify the risk.

So feel free to check out my site to see the quality of the work, and of course, suggestion and feedback are always welcome.

Thanks for reading and I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Andy

[stevelam]

no doctype.
validation failure.
obvious signs of frontpage/dreamweaver markup.
tons of deprecated code.
layout done in tables.
many input fields lack validation. for example i shouldn't be able to put "asdf" as my phone number and still have it work.
no clean seo-optimized urls for individual product pages.
no use of proper header tags for seo.
no dynamic titles/meta info.
for whatever reason, the bottom right corner isn't rounded like the rest.

i guess you got your $150's worth.

the shopping cart + paypal integration looks like it was done decently though.

[lcschung]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for pointing them out.

But as you said, I think I did get my money worth. It also came with the admin page where I can upload new products, manage my order and customer.

Couldn't ask for more =)

And also, I think for people who just want to get their products out there to "test the water", $150 isn't a bad investment, comparing to other solutions. And of course as I said before, there were like 20 bids on my project range from $150 - $2000, you can always go for the higher end option for better quality (I suppose).

Cheers,

Andy

[hellodan]

Wow... i know its not perfect, but for $150 thats not bad...

Goodluck with your store!

[darudude]

as a web designer for a corporation, I must say that you definitely got a very good site for your money! Congratulations. Do you think you could upload a few screen shots of the admin page? I'd be interested in seeing that as well. Also do you know the company/person you dealt with? He seems to have some pretty good design sense and could come in handy for a project im working on.

[george benjamin]

Who made the design?

[lcschung]

I made the design myself =)

And I got a friend of mine to do product shots for me.

When you post your project on guru.com, you got to see customer reviews, sample work of the people who're bidding on your project, so you actually could have a sense of how the quality would be.

The admin page is nothing fancy, just a standard one with function to "manage product", "manage order", "manage customer", and everything stored in database.

I think if you have a project with simple requirement (or like this one, it's just pretty standard eCommerce site), that would work fine. But if you have complicated requirements and business rules, the communication part could be quite tricky, unless you have a properly written requirement document.

Another tips that my friend offered is that if you have big project, try break it down into small pieces and give to different people (or start piece by piece). That way you lower your risk and if you find someone good, then you can give them all afterward.

At first I was thinking once I got the source code, I could just to future touch up and enhancement myself. But now I don't think so, I think I'll just post another small project on there so that I can focus on the more important stuff.

[CSR]

Wow... i know its not perfect, but for $150 thats not bad...

Goodluck with your store!

+1 It's nice looking without going into the technical stuff as Steve pointed out.

[Frankie3s]

Site looks great. That's pretty impressive for $150.

[Shojin]

Another tips that my friend offered is that if you have big project, try break it down into small pieces and give to different people (or start piece by piece). That way you lower your risk and if you find someone good, then you can give them all afterward.


What risk are you referring to? Having your ideas stolen?

How does one mitigate this risk (other than breaking it up into smaller pieces)? NDAs?

[lcschung]

I was referring to the risk of hiring guru with poor quality.

[radeonboy]

Pretty good for a basic site! Looks clean and simple.

Only thing slightly annoying for me is that the top buttons are not aligned the same for different pages. So each page, the buttons at the top right change a little bit, meaning you have to move the mouse to click it.

Its nice though!

[thelootlady]

Hi.. Unfortunately I have spent money for nothing twice with outside sources. It was not guru.. but again.. be careful. I got a great start up page.. send my 50% deposit..and got nothing else! You may want to check out: networksolutions.com They are big and reliable. You get what you pay for sometimes.