So I am about to start a small online shop, for a little business idea I have. Nothing big, just a handful of products related to motorsports that I'll be making myself or buying in from local british manufactures.

I have the domain, and I played with wordpress shop theme hosted solution, but its £80 for the year, and then a further few hundred for the paypal/card payment thingy... benefits are its pretty easy to manage, and has some nice looking themes, downsides is the ongoing costs when sales might be really slow/non existent most months.

Planning on having a really static product range.

I was considering getting one of these crowd sourcing sites to get a quote for the full solution, which can be hosted on my domain at a much lower price than wordpress or similar. Not sure where this leaves me in terms of updating product ranges/prices etc

Though that wouldn't sort out the money processing element.

I had toyed with a simple website that acts as a conduit to using ebay as the "shop"... might be easier than maintaining two lists of what I have in stock, and gets away from the payment issue - though ties me into ebay and their daft stars rating, which assumes I am sat waiting for an order 24/7 and their annoying returns/disputes process.

So a few options, but wanted to pick the collective might of locostbuilders brains for inspiration.

Interesting! I suspect more people would like to do this if it were easier to do.

A benefit to using ebay for sales is the trust some people put in ebay (certainly over new web shops) might help get sales off the ground. I have my own domain and taught myself HTML (slowly). Whilst satisfying it's not quick and demanded time and effort (done pre-kids in my case). As you've already found there may be quicker and easier methods, but they come with costs.

There are others on LCB with online shops (russbost) who may be able to guide you through the process.

[Edited on 14/12/16 by nick205]

E-Bay shop. At least it will show how popular your product is, before committing money into a online payment system of you own.

Consider advertising and promotion, Ebay has things well established and people consider it a 'default' first place to look nowadays (along with Amazon). Unless you get an expert in, chances are an independent website won't even show up on Google search results.

It's horrible to think of Ebay being a sales monopoly, but that's pretty much what it is.

Good luck with the new venture.

I think it's a good idea to start with ebay, it has a huge audience/customer base, something that would take time and effort for a new webshop.

I've done a few websites with Website X5 and i'm sure it has everything in there to create a webshop.

I've recently set-up my own business remanufacturing turbos and obviously payment methods is something i've had to look into too. Worldpay have recently started a 'pay as you go' type of method, at first i was paying out 40 quid a month but never using it because most of my customers are local and prefer to pay cash or bank transfer, anyhow Worldpay Zinc is worth looking at.

sorry to babble on.

Drop me a line if you think i can be of assistance

Being in the e-commerce business consultancy for the last 5 years, my recommendations are:

-Don't go to a cheap managed solution as in long term you will be in their hands. Use an open source like Prestashop, Magento or Woocommerce. Which to choose depends on the number of products and few other factors.

-Opening a website is almost free, and will be the best hidden secret ever. You will need an average budget in order to optimise and get traffic to it.

-eBay and Amazon are way cheaper options, return policies are good for sellers and their confidence in buying your products. Think of them as a big Mall, initially you pay more but you have to be there. Magento and prestashop are teh best platforms to sell on eBay and Amazon.

-The more products you have, more possibilities to have bigger sales.

-Paypal will allow your customers to pay as a guest, but there are other possibilities like WorldPay.

For car parts, UK is using the registration of the car to find out parts, if you get your parts indexed with a Vehicle reg lookup, you sales will increase around 30%. Ebay UK and DE has also car parts index.

With the actual value of the Pound, I would definitely sell over eBay and Amazon and in different languages so your incomes are coming mainly from Europe.

You can go on the cheap and make a lot of money, and go on the not that cheap and earn nothing.

I hope you find this info useful, and that you succeed!

Cheers

Sounds like an exciting project.

I actually work for a company that builds websites including e commerce.

To keep costs down we generally work with WordPress and woocommerce. We have a graphic designer, web developer and a team of guys that specialize in search engine optimization, pay per click, blogging, social campaigns etc.

If you wanted a turnkey solution with branding, shop, seo etc the guys would be more than capable of making it happen for you. You'd be looking at somewhere around £3k for starters.

Feel free to u2u if you need more info

Agree. Ebay and Amazon. -

Having said that, I set up a fully functioning ecommerce site for a dozen products, for next to nothing. - £17/yr to host Wordpress, and Woocommerce. hooked up to Paypalwith a 3rd party plug in and got an SSL cert for £50/yr - you can get these a lot cheaper but install is complex. Wordfence handles the security.
Set up was simple, the ready made themes make it look professional. Woocommerce comes with lots of free systems - you pay for the fancy plug ins. I also have Stripe set up but never used it.

BUT as pointed out above, without time, dedication and money you are not going to drive any sales to it so you unless you are aiming for huge volume you might as well pony up the 15% to sell on Ebay/Amazon depending on which your product is most suited too. You can always have a nice website and use affiliate links to point to your own products !

If your particular sector attracts ebay idiots then you will see it in the feedback of others in the same industry.

HTH

Thanks guys - interesting to hear your views.

The idea is certainly not worth £x thousands in web development, so I will stick with straight forward options, and look further into the products people have mentioned for integration with bigger marketplaces. Thanks