Ecommerce websites

Introduction

Ecommerce covers a multitude of online shop options with a wide range of payment and delivery options. Sites using e-commerce solutions are everywhere - from global-scale sites like eBay and Amazon.com, to medium sized enterprises like pet stores and franchises, to small-scale businesses and services.

The benefits of an online shop are numerous: once it's up and running, there are very low overheads (compared to a physical storefront). You can edit, add and remove content whenever you need to and track visits to individual pages of your site, allowing you to see what your visitors are really interested in and what products or services make the highest sales conversions.

If you are interested in having an online shop, or are considering which e-commerce platform suits your business, you may find the information below very useful.

Considerations for an ecommerce store

Is your website primarily e-commerce with a few static pages, or would you like to have a fully integrated e-commerce/forum/blogger site?

Advantage to having everything in the one site - products can reference articles/pages and vice versa. Eg. a recipe blog can easily link through to ingredients in the store. Other assets are also shared, like images and documents. If your site has a paid membership and an online store, users only have to create the one account to access both.

How much should an ecommerce store cost to build?

Would you like to sell one product, or would you like a global (multi warehouse, international shipping, multiple sellers) type store? For most of our clients, we find the pre-built/quick install solutions offer the required functionality already, and much of our time is spent on designing/theming, configuration/personalisation, and training/handover. A small store, custom designed, with a set number of shipping modules and payment gateways to choose from should cost around $2750. However, if this is your business' only source of revenue and method of exposure, you should be looking at a package that includes cross-selling/up-selling features, a tailored checkout, search engine marketing, advanced product categorisation/searches, studio shots of your products, and professional copywriting. Read our article about pricing an ecommerce store to find out more.

Well known systems

There are half a dozen great e-commerce platforms, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. We're not dedicated to any one system, though as an agency with a focus on Drupal and Wordpress, we feel most comfortable with ecommerce systems within these two platforms. For projects on other platforms, we have a body of programmers we can rely on to bring in when needed.

A quick search on the net will bring up pages like this Wikipedia article with a comparison table of various e-commerce platforms. Though this comparison table is useful on a basic level, it doesn't answer the questions clients can't be caught unawares by half way through their e-commerce store development. See "Making a decision" next.

Making a decision

Below is a list of some major online store software platforms. There are many other e-commerce solutions that we could mention, even some we've used before on client's projects, but as you'll see from this list, it really only comes down to a few options for the majority of clients.

Note: I've tried to list examples of well known brand sites for each ecommerce platform, but for those where I could not find a well known brand, I displayed the best looking sites I could find.

PAY UPFRONT
Drupal CMS + Drupal Commerce Our preferred system, Drupal Commerce is the most actively developed commerce platform for Drupal, and as part of Drupal, builds on the ideology that your store probably needs a unique configuration to your industry. Addon modules are free. Link to official site: www.drupalcommerce.org Examples: Brockenchack Wines, Cartier, Royal Mail
Drupal CMS + Ubercart A tried and trusted ecommerce platform, Ubercart has been around for many years as part of Drupal 5, 6 and 7, and therefore has a large user base and many plug-and-play modules. For small to mid-range e-commerce stores, Ubercart still holds its own against the highly configurable Drupal Commerce. Addon modules are free. Link to official site: www.ubercart.org Examples: Pioneer, Emporium Aquila, Gemini lights, smile., Design Panoply
Magento Magento is probably the foremost e-commerce system available, with a bevy of large corporations building off Magento's robust framework. Magento has the most number of shipping and payment modules worldwide, with a huge selection of e-commerce features included straight out of the box. We highly recommend Magento for two scenarios. 1) You need a robust, open source e-commerce platform quickly AND you have no interest in customising the look and feel of the template you've chosen. Although Magento's fully kitted out with most likely all the modules and extensions you'll ever need, it has a reputation for being a beast; hard to tame (customise). 2) You are a large coporation that advertises in main stream media, you have a large budget, and you simply need an online store to sell the incoming masses. Magento is geared almost completely towards one thing - selling and the selling experience. What it doesn't have over some of its smaller competitors (like Drupal) is the ability to easily integrate with other content within the same website. Don't think you can easily incorporate a forum, blog, user content, a community into the same space as your store. Note: The Enterprise edition annual fees start at $15,550/year and the Enterprise Edition Premium starts at $77,990/year. Some extensions are paid and some are free. Link to official site: www.magento.com Examples: Nike, Dick Smith, Bing Lee
PrestaShop PrestaShop has some beautiful samples in its gallery of online stores, but at this stage, it's more of a European centric platform, making it hard to find an Australian site using the PrestaShop software. There is a large number of installations worldwide, it's open source but some extensions are commercial. Addon modules are quite expensive. Link to official site: www.prestashop.com/en Examples: Rustycage, Vogue&LV, Autre Paire de Manches, Artisan Coutelier
Joomla! + Virtuemart Virtuemart is a fairly extensive ecommerce platform, integrated with the Joomla! CMS. Though both Virtuemart and Joomla! are open source and free, many of the extensions for Virtuemart are paid extensions. The Joomla! platform has also historically been susceptible to security flaws and can be quite hard to update to a newer, secure version. Link to official site: www.virtuemart.net Examples: Grid Kit, Kitehood, Saint Basics, Ting, Iron Grizzly, De Gouden Schatkist
osCommerce osCommerce presents itself with strong credentials but looking into its showcase, we cannot find many osCommerce sites that look half decent. Many of the nicer sites in their portfolio had been moved over to an alternative platform. See below for some of the best examples we could find. Link to official site: www.oscommerce.com Examples: Ubuntu, Lord of the Rings Jewellery, Springfield Stables
Zen Cart Zen Cart is an open source ecommerce platform based off osCommerce, but with some major architectural changes and core features. From every description we've read, this looks like fully fledged e-commerce system, with customisable templates, ongoing open source development, and support for Australian shipping/payments (possibly not all payment gateways). The main two reasons I would avoid it is the lack of any big name brands utilising the software, and the sheer number of ugly sites in the showcase. Link to official site: www.zen-cart.com Examples: Flooring Supply Shop, Fox Cartel, Oxford Street Books, BridalShower.ie, SmartAuto24.com, Trail Explorers.com
PAY AS YOU GO
Magento Go Magento Go is the little brother to the Magento e-commerce platform. As a pay-as-you-go service, Magento Go builds on the excellent framework of Magento, without the large up front costs a Magento site can incur. For someone exploring the Magento platform for a large e-commerce store in the future, we recommend starting up a Magento Go store for a period of time and exploring the possibilities. Magento Go's main hitch is that the system is relatively locked down both in design and configuration. This is good for someone new to e-commerce, but bad for someone who's exhausted their avenues for user experience, design improvements, and unique product configurations. Pricing: Somewhere between $15/month and $125/month depending on the list of features you'd like. Link to official site: www.magento.com/products/overview#go
Shopify Shopify is the perfect pay-as-you-go e-commerce platform when your store's look and feel are essential to the sales experience. Just have a look through some of the beautiful sample sites below to see what we mean. Pricing: Somewhere between $14/month and $179/month depending on the list of features you'd like, with many addons costing a further $amount/month. Link to official site: www.shopify.com Examples: DODOcase, Holstee, Pop Chart Labs, Hard Graft, Hiut Denim Co.
Volusion Volusion Pricing: Somewhere between $15/month and $135/month depending on the list of features you'd like, with many addons costing a further $amount/month. Link to official site: www.volusion.com Examples: Kammok, Steve's PaleoGoods, Galway Bay Apparel, CatalogDog.com