For better or worse, the days when traders sold their wares out of a cart in the street have long gone. Thanks to modern technology you don’t even need to step outside your house to become a successful wheeler-dealer. Taking your business online makes sense on so many different levels, but many people are still put off, thinking that it requires a lot of time, effort and money. That doesn’t need to be the case though.
You have three main options to choose from when building an eCommerce site for your company. The first is to get someone to design a bespoke application for you. No hassle for you but that’s going to cost you pretty big. The second is to build it all yourself. This means designing a site then building a back-end system to store and manage a database of products, before creating some sort of payment processing system. You can do this using PHP and MySQL then bolting on an ordering system. This is a lot of effort though and unless you’re a coding whizzkid it’s nigh-on impossible.
The third option is much more appetising – install an eCommerce site creation program to build and manage the site yourself. This gives you the flexibility to design and structure the site how you want without having to get your hands dirty with coding. Here are some of the best solutions out there:
- osCommerce – Complete online store solution – and it’s free!
- ShopFactory – Excellent all-in-one tool for creating online stores
- EasyWare Shopping Cart – Apply an online ordering facility to your site
- dbQwikSite – Create web pages for eCommerce sites
- 4D Business Kit – Build and manage your own eCommerce store
