Decision Time – a website with a shop or a prepaid shopping cart with a website?

Decision Time – a website with a shop or a prepaid shopping cart with a website?

So you have a physical shop or you’ve been selling things online via eBay or Etsy and you want to expand and create an online shop of you’re very own! A bit of googling might present you with 2 options. Use a pay per month shopping cart or have a website with an eCommerce system built in. As we build the kind of websites that have shops built in we though we would give you some of the pros and cons.

Shopping carts are great if you want to set things up quickly and get going right away, you might even get a few months free when you do. The problem we see with this is you are then tied into this system for the life of the website which can cost from anything between £20 per month to £250 per month depending on the plan you need. It may start out as a quick, easy and cheap option but costs could quickly escalate over time and end up costing you more than if you had a website designed and made.

You are also possibly tied into the designs and themes that they provide you with, although most shops generally look the same on the product pages the home page might be what makes you stand out from the rest, which in a crowded market place is essential.

Trying not to be too negative about them, they work really well for lots of people BUT if you want to have more control and options maybe the bespoke website option is for you.

We can build you a custom set up and shop with pretty much any set up you need. These are just some of the examples we created –

• Bonnie Tartan needed a very specific order form for each product, we integrated Gravity Forms into WooCommerce to create many different forms that would suit all the products that Bonnie stocked.
• Hashtag Scottish Gifts wanted to post items around the world without people paying over the odds for postage, we set up the system so that the postage was calculated by the weight of the items bought.
• Lendrick Lodge only needed people to pay the deposit which would vary per course, it needed to be easy to set up for the staff and the users to pay. Gravity forms provided the engine to create a bespoke system that suited them.

Taking payments online is now even easier, you always have the ever trusty Paypal but now there is a payment processing provider called Stripe whose fees are less than Paypal and it is just as easy to integrate.

What we are saying is sit down and weigh up what you need from your online shop before you dive into something. Send us an email if you want to find out more or just have a few questions