The Right Platform

Filed Under: Getting Started, Site-Build

In a previous post I mentioned that the easiest way to get an existing brick & mortar business online (small business that is) is to set up a Yahoo store. It provides everything you need and you can get a “good enough” design from their templates so you don’t have to struggle with webdesign. You can even register your domain name and do everything through Yahoo. However, Yahoo does cost about $40/month and provides a lot of features that a smaller, first time retailer may not need.

For a smaller e-commerce store you simply won’t need all the “store” features that a Yahoo, or other shopping cart software, provides and with just a little bit of work, you can probably create an online store by using WordPress (or other Blog/CMS software) and PayPal. The key question here is a) how many products you have, and b) how often are you adding or updating your product list.

I am currently working on a site that will contain about 20 products. While I am certainly a proponent of Yahoo’s cart I don’t like the lack of flexibility it offers, especially for smaller sites that may no be purely e-commerce related (as is the case with the project I am working on). At the moment I am leaning toward working with WordPress and using an e-commerce plugin that I have found. If it works as I hope, it could make building small e-commerce stores a whole lot easier and with all kinds of flexibility. More importantly, it may make it very simple for someone with little knowledge of coding to implement.

Again, this is about doing things “on the cheap” and not looking to build something from scratch that requires extensive coding or development. It is also about being able to edit and manage your site on your own and not having to pay someone significant amounts of money to do so. Mind you if you are doing this yourself, you will need some knowledge of html, css, and php and what WordPress does.

If you are unfamiliar with WordPress, there are a couple books at Amazon that will help you out.