topic Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store in Selling

Suggestions for an eCommerce store

surfsupaustralia — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 03:01:56 GMT

Hello fellow eBayers.

I came on to see if I was the only one whose sales have literally stopped completely over the last week which is a first for me and it seems eBay is playing games yet again.

Having been solely on eBay selling for over 11 years now I believe it’s time to obtain my own website. I will still remain on eBay however the amount of fees I pay to them and the poor way I feel I get treated by their customer service when needed I feel it’s time for a bit of a change.

What I would really like is to know if any of you have your own website and who you are with. I have been doing a lot of research and now I am just confused. Volusion, shopify, bigcommerce? I would really like eBay inventory integration and to stay away from the whole % of sales fee. I am leaning towards bigcommerce but still undecided.

If anyone has any suggestions, recommendations, experiences or feedback about what works well, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

indigorosey — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 04:42:02 GMT

@surfsupaustralia wrote:
Hello fellow eBayers.

I came on to see if I was the only one whose sales have literally stopped completely over the last week which is a first for me and it seems eBay is playing games yet again.

Having been solely on eBay selling for over 11 years now I believe it’s time to obtain my own website. I will still remain on eBay however the amount of fees I pay to them and the poor way I feel I get treated by their customer service when needed I feel it’s time for a bit of a change.

What I would really like is to know if any of you have your own website and who you are with. I have been doing a lot of research and now I am just confused. Volusion, shopify, bigcommerce? I would really like eBay inventory integration and to stay away from the whole % of sales fee. I am leaning towards bigcommerce but still undecided.

If anyone has any suggestions, recommendations, experiences or feedback about what works well, it would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

I have been with eBay since 2003 and dabbled in selling but returned a few months ago in the hopes of making my businesses fulltime and I was shocked at the difference. There were always gripes on the boards about fees, listing violations and powersellers but now it is a totally different ballgame.

Now sales seem to be affected by the 'algorhythm du jour' and theres nothing you can do about it. I am in the process of migrating to websites, and I too found it confusing! I took up trials on a few sites but settled on Shopify. I didn't trial Big Commerce but I did read a lot of reviews that said it was not as intuitive to set up, also because Shopify is much larger and templates are better. Bear in mind I'm not integrating my listings, I have imported them but will not be merging inventory etc, so I don't know how the two compare. I did have to add a couple of free apps from Shopify to set up, (importing eBay listings and adding a Facebook store) which I believe are already included in Big Commerce.

Volusion was very disappointing simply because of the multiple emails and phone calls I got during my trial, they really try to push you into a subscription from day 1.

Anyway I am very much a novice when it comes to building websites, and I have only done a soft launch to allow me to direct my Facebook customers to somewhere they can pay, but so far so good.

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

kizacks — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 04:43:27 GMT

definitely worthwhile doing. I used Weebly to build my website (it;s not open source though) they provide everything you need to make an ecommerce website. I pay 29.95 per month atm for a business account, but if you pay 2 years upfront, it works out to be 19.95usd per month.

The website took me about 2 weeks to set up.

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

downeyas — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 04:50:29 GMT

Check your messages love - Sandra 🙂

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

surfsupaustralia — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 05:05:50 GMT

Yes, I found volusion very disappointing also due to the pushy nature of them and did just try Shopify trial. It imported well and can see a clean up is needed before going live but more investigation needed on my part there. Thanks for your advice.

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

surfsupaustralia — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 05:07:04 GMT

Thankyou for the Weebly suggestion. I did not even consider them and will look into it further as their pricing and what they offer is great!

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

surfsupaustralia — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 05:11:05 GMT

I have no messages Sandra 😞

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

maconii — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 05:59:54 GMT

+1 for Weebly.
I used them for a while until I built a more sustainable one. I moved away from weebly only because back then they didn't have a shipping option (but I'm sure they have one now).

If you're a little tech savvy, you can try to build your own website. I'm currently using Open Cart which is an open source CMS. Easy to install. I'm not sure about eBay integration, but perhaps there's a plugin for it. The good thing about this is that there's no monthly fees or limitations on how many items you can list/sell. You only need to pay for the domain name and host.

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

downeyas — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 08:46:56 GMT

It's there darling - the bay hasn't messed with it which is a surprise lol - oh, and I meant your eBay messages 🙂

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

surfsupaustralia — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 09:16:11 GMT

Yes well maybe they have messed with it because I have not received any messages today. Very strange but lol.... yeah!

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

clarry100 — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 11:02:05 GMT

We have just in this past week set up our own site on Shopify.

I found it very easy going to set up. Very intuitive..

Lots of templates to pick from and we settled on one of the free ones.

It readily imported all of our ebay listings. With a few errors to correct.

A few things skipped that needed manual tweaking.

Like it fails to import SKUs on single listings without variations.

Fails to associate pictures with variations on listings with variations.

Also looks like some of the quantities that were available on the ebay listings are incorrect.

Setting up Links to use as categories on your home page took a bit of getting used to but once you get the idea its quite simple really.

We have yet to make a sale but we haven't done any advertising just yet either. Intend to give Google Adwords a try.

We are also negotiating to use eway payment gateway as well as paypal. They are a bit cheaper than paypal and then you can accept cards as well.

All up I've been very happy with the outcome on Shopify so far.

We also registered our own URL thru GoDaddy so now we don't have the myshopify in the URL.

Now lets see how sales go over the coming months.

If we can get it to work reasonably well we will probably ditch ebay as they are just too hard to deal with and too damned expensive for what you get.

Not sure if/not I'm allowed to display the URL on here for others to take a look at.

Re: Suggestions for an eCommerce store

surfsupaustralia — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 12:00:38 GMT

Please let me know how you go if possible. I would be very interested.

Also which plan you went for etc.. They do seem to have the best eBay inventory to site that I can see so far.

Cheers