I came across your post here while searching for my own self-hosted eCommerce solution. First I’ll quickly describe where I’m at, then I’ll go back a bit in time and move on to where I hope to go from here.

I make a lot of my own products, so I sell on a couple of crafter’s websites. My current favorite is my studio at http://www.OnceUponASilverMoon.ArtFire.com, which is $10 per month to list as much as I want, with no percentage taken out.

I had been on Etsy, but I’ve recently closed those stores. I have noticed that Etsy’s brand over-rules the seller’s brand. They definitely have their pros and cons. You can list a product for a mere .20, which lasts four months (unless you sell the item or renew the listing), and you get 5 pictures. They do take a cut of your sales, though. I don’t recall the current figure but it’s somewhere around 3%.

I used to have a physical location which in my rosy hindsight was well-loved by my customers. I’m probably just making that up from sentiment, but people do still ask me if I’m going to do it again. YES. I will have another store in about a year. So I’m spending the time leading up to the opening of the new place re-growing my local customer base and re-establishing my brand name.

When people buy things from Etsy, that’s what they say: I got it from someone on Etsy. Etsy was stealing my name brand.

ArtFire, where I’m currently housed, offers a lot more in terms of listings, 10 photos, you don’t renew the listing to bump it up in their internal search. The staff at ArtFire is pretty transparent in how your products get sent to Google shopping and their forums are really helpful in terms of providing education on SEO and other important online marketing techniques and information. (You can read these forums for free… I advise it for anyone starting out on any kind of eCommerce.)

ArtFire is also pretty good at trying to help the sellers develop their own brand, their own feel. They provide a blog so the sellers can reach out and communicate with the customers. A recent survey in Country Business magazine showed that most shoppers want to connect with a business through their blog. Even if a merchant feels that blogging is one-sided, it’s not; the customer builds a relationship with you by reading your words. It’s a little weird, but true.

Now, though, when I am trying to grow my “brand”, my image, trying to figure out how to translate the future store into an online look and feel, I know I definitely need the control of a self-hosted shop.

When I had my old shop, back in 2002-2005,crazy as it might seem, people were still pretty wary of buying things online. They didn’t want to shop your website when they could come in and experience the things for themselves. Mine is a niche market, a metaphysical store. So a lot of the specialness of shopping at such a store was about how it smelled, how it felt, how it sparkled. The so-called “vibes” of my shop.

Now, though, loads of people shop online, but more than that, they use your online presence to check out what’s going on before they head out the door. Is there a coupon? Is there a class tomorrow they might want to catch, instead of coming out today? What are your hours, or your phone number? I myself use Google or a website to find a phone number instead of dialling information or using that uh, what’s it. Phone book. I’m not sure I even have one.

So I definitely need my own webstore, because I can use it, sure, as an online store, but also to give extra information that doesn’t really work as signage, like a really long list of uses for herbs, or mystickal meanings of crystals. Sometimes people will find you and want to shop with you because they found your site by searching for information on something, rather than because they were looking for a certain product.

So. In the past I struggled with OS Commerce, which is not very user friendly. I have to say I just gave it up. My programmer spouse spent a lot of time trying to coax it into something we could live with, but in the end, we just abandoned it.

Before that, I had sold a bit on a Yahoo store, but figured out really quickly that if I decided to switch from one hosted store to another such as an eBay or PayPal store, I would lose everything. All my items would have to be re-entered by hand, all my pictures would have to be resized, or even maybe re-shot, and that’s back when I still had a film camera so it was really pricey to do that. I am not the type who enjoys re-working my entire catalogue, especially when I’ve tried out a site for a while and change my mind.

In one case I was with a company I kinda liked and then they folded, taking my store down with them. I didn’t even get any advance notice, so I lost everything.

I have not had an eCommerce site since then other than Etsy and ArtFire.

I have been seriously looking at solutions for about a month. I am an Amazon affiliate, and I’d like to be able to do book reviews and link to the book on Amazon to get a little credit. To that end, you can set up a whole Amazon webstore for a fairly reasonable price and if you wanted to, I guess you could probably carry their entire catalogue (yikes). So one of the things I’ve been looking for is to be able to integrate that affiliate program into my own webstore. As far as I can tell, that isn’t going to happen, I don’t think it is something that shopping cart programmers even want to attempt, it would be crazy complicated probably. So I think I’m either stuck with making a link to a “bookstore”, or just putting a “buy it now” link on each blog page. Neither appeals but it beats actually buying the book and having it in my inventory.

I did look into 3DCart, which is a hosted solution. But a simple query turned into a nightmare when I got a jerk instead of a customer service expert. I have blogged about this here:
hxxp://www.onceuponasilvermoon.com/blog/?p=26
(note — change the xx to tt; I don’t know if it’s OK to post a link in the comments.)

So what I’m searching for now is something fairly easy to use, something I can upload a lot of stuff to as a csv file, download/backup, and tweak. I have to see a lot of templates before one clicks, and then I’ll probably want to insert my own background or change the size of something. I am NOT real good with html, let alone css, php, or anything more complicated. I’m great at running a shop and making stuff, not so great at programming.

I have played around with Agora Cart and found it to be the most user-friendly, although I seem to remember having some issue with the shipping module.

I keep trying out ZenCart but it is just SO unfriendly to n00bz. I want to sell, not learn. I’m willing to do a little bit of stuff, but when it comes down to hacking on a store, screwing it up, breaking things, and trying to learn how to fix them again, I would really rather be spending that time making an expensive necklace. It’s more likely to sell at a psychic fair than online anyway. This is a bad attitude to have toward ecommerce, so for me it’s probably best to stay away from ZenCart and OS Commerce.

I don’t take PayPal, and that puts a limit on a lot of the shops I could use. I also don’t want to fork up a lot of cash for Authorize.net (they hosed me a few years ago and I’m not eager to give them a second go). I use ProPay as my card processor. They are integrated into some of the stores. I also accept Google checkout and Amazon payments, as well as the old fashioned check or money order.

These days a lot of the shopping carts will take Google and Amazon, and some of them even have a ProPay gateway, so my choices are better.

So, then, what I suggest for people just starting out:

From Day One, if you are serious about your business, buy a domain and use it as your email. You can never start too soon with branding yourself. Don’t use gmail or yahoo, use your domain.

Make an online presence at your domain — however you do it, whether by using a template, a tool like Front Page, or hacking it out by hand, make a front page for your site that looks great. It’s better to have a good looking static page than a crap one (like mine). Update it sometimes to keep it fresh. WordPress is really easy to install and use, and makes it very easy to create pages that look nice and have a bit of news occasionally.

This turns out to be important later on down the line, because the search engines rank your sexiness based on how long you have had a domain. Later, when your products are at your domain’s website instead of eBay’s, this helps a little with their ranking. It could mean the difference between being on page 1 and page 2, which often means you won’t be seen at all.

First give selling a shot on eBay. Just list and sell a few things. Online selling isn’t for anyone and this is about as simple, and as annoying, as you can get. You will always have annoying customers, so wade right in and experience them full-force on eBay. Do you like packing and shipping? Does your packaging look like crap, or do you put a little effort into making the customer feel rewarded for their purchase? It doesn’t have to get pricey, but if you can’t figure out how to make your packages unique at this level, you probably need to give it a bit of thought.

(Hint: wrapping the item in tissue and tying a simple ribbon bow is super easy, yet will separate you from the herd right away.)

This is also the right level for learning whether you enjoy the book keeping involved with online selling. Don’t leave it til the last minute — find an accounting solution that will work for you. There’s a lot of ways to keep the books. Everyone has a favorite, and if you find a way you like, it’s actually kinda fun.

If you find you have a taste for sales, open up an eBay store. Slightly less frustrating. Still easier than just jumping into the deep end.

These are training wheels. The next step involves doing your own marketing, because the shopping mall approach of eBay or Etsy or ArtFire can only get you so far. Eventually, your products will have to be found by Google searches, and getting there is a learning curve.

While doing the eBay thing, make a business account for yourself on Facebook. Six months ago you could not have dragged me to Facebook, but your customers are there. I finally had enough people tell me to do it, so I tried it, and it seems to be working. But you have to actually provide quality content, as in, comment on people’s stuff in relevant ways, otherwise they just think you’re a spammer and block you. I do not share any personal information on Facebook — mine is strictly business. But it’s my “shopkeeper” persona, the person behind the counter. I want my “friends” to think about Me when they shop at my store. They are buying a little bit of Me when they buy my stuff, and they can’t buy Me anywhere else but at my store. My time and energy went into my products. I only get that back as an exchange of their time and energy, which is manifested as their money. They appreciate my time and energy, and I appreciate theirs.

It’s an extension of the blog/relationship thing. They have to get to know you, “trust” you, take your word that your products are awesome. Even if it’s not the you who goes home at the end of the day, people want to think they know you a bit. They will come back again and again if they have even the smallest reason to be loyal to you. So give them a good reason!

After a while you’ll migrate to a hosted cart while learning tougher stuff like making a marketable website. Work on your website, and learn about SEO. Put up a blog and learn to use it. Train yourself to blog regularly. I don’t have a recommendation for a hosted cart, just try to pick one that will let you back up your info to a CSV to make it a little easier to insert into your new shop.

Review and research your options. Be sure to search for reviews, and especially complaints, about any software you are contemplating.

You will know when you are fully ready to do a self-hosted webstore. You’ll be used to the procedure of listing and selling, your book keeping will be a routine, and you have established a good presence online. Your customers will have a lot of fun when you throw your grand opening (or grand re-opening). Coupons galore! Free gift with purchase! And what’s great is that by ditching all the pay solutions, you can actually afford to do it.

Yes, that’s one of the signs that you are ready — you have enough time to grind your teeth over the hosting fees.

Remember though that you are levelling up, so you’ll be a newbie again in some ways. It’s a big responsibility, like getting promoted. Give yourself permission to be “new” again and don’t get frustrated. Your business isn’t going to suffer by being at a hosted store, so take your time and find what you like.

Hope this helps!

Ande Spenser
http://www.OnceUponASilverMoon.com
http://www.MetaphysicalMerchants.com/forum — come learn about SEO and marketing for the New Age niche!

You make some good points about shopping carts above. However by the the time a newbie develops a site or blog that truly needs a shopping cart I’m thinking they would be beyond the newbie stage.

Maybe a better article for the true newbie might be one on how to setup a PayPal account and “Buy Now” button, or maybe you already have one.

Just my two cents worth.

Vic