Having a great idea and a product or service to sell is just the beginning.

There is so much to do!.

There is just so much that you need to do before you start an e-commerce business and there is so much more to do after you have your site set up. The truth is unless you are a very competent script writer or programmer, this really is a very arduous task and an absolute minefield.

The best solution is to find a company that offers an e-commerce software solution that fulfils your needs and ticks all the right boxes in your checklist. Oh yes, a checklist, you should definitely have a checklist.

We have literally built hundreds of e-commerce stores and I have used many, many types of e-commerce software so we feel we can give a pretty good insight into a few of the most commonly used ones on the market.

What Are My Options?

Recently (over the past six months) I have personally built many e-commerce stores using Magento, OS Commerce, Big Commerce, Venda, Pro Stores & Zen Cart. They all work and they all work pretty well, however from a users point of view some are much better than others.

Firstly there is something that we have to take into consideration and that is the type of software you will be using. You can buy the software outright, use a free cart software or use a hosted cart software.
Now FREE always sounds good but it’s not always the case!

• The first option is to buy a software outright, this gives you access to all the code; PHP, CSS et cetera, and you get all the bolt on goodies attached and the upgrades too.
• The second option is to use an open Source Software, this is Great if you have good programming skills, you just download the software, read the attached documentation and build everything on a local server and when your done upload the lot including the database to your hosting site. You have thousands of really great options and plug-ins to get your site looking really professional.
• The third option is using a company that offers hosted e-commerce solutions, this is when you pay a monthly fee and the software is pre-built, you have acces to loads of really easy to customise templates, its totally stable and hosted on the best servers around. Now as a beginner, or novice – intermediate user this is by far the very best way to get yourself up and running and keep the costs down to a minimum.

Some of the most common open source programs are OS Commerce, Magento, Presta Shop, Cube Cart and Zen Cart. Now before you send loads of e-mails telling me that there are better, I am not disputing that, there are loads more and I am not omitting them because they are inferior, I am only naming the ones I have recently used. As with most of the open source programmes available, you can buy templates from a huge amount of companies and change the look of the store, these are known as themes, and some of them are really fantastic. However they can be a bit pricey too. Lets sat that you do the following:

• Purchase a domain name. - € 9.00
• Pay for 1 year of fast hosting for the site – € 96.00
• (Remember its a hungry database so you need good hosting.)
• Purchse a Nice Template – € 140.00

Your total financial outlay so far = €245.00 not too bad when you consider the millions your new dot-com site is going to make you eh…

But hold on a mo’ if it were that easy, we would all be Billionaires living in our big fancy Castles and sailing around the Caribbean on our floating palaces. There really is so much more involved, all the optimisation, the ad campaigns, producing sexy banners, newsletters and so on. More time and more money!

Total number hours invested 40 hours – 80 hours at lets say 10 hours a week that’s four- six weeks and you still haven’t sold a thing.

A Solution Is At Hand

We at ndi3 can identify the type of e-commerce site you need to build and we will build it for you. We take all the headaches away from the initial purchase of the domain name to the hosting and setting up your shopping cart. We will design your company logo then create and build the whole package. Now that's a solution. More importantly our rates are very competitive and you will find that our tailored packages are very affordable.