What do i need to create an eCommerce website?

I am planning to create a new ecommerce website for selling art paintings from some countries on the world. I want to know what do i need to create an eCommerce website for more convenient for my customers and easy to manage for myself?

If you are thinking of creating an online store to showcase the products and services you want to promote, then I can help with a few basic details.

First, let me give you some advice: if you are still undecided whether to create a site E-Commerce or create an account at Amazon or eBay ... well, let me say that in this case the comparison and doubt should not even exist.

With your site E-Commerce will have the opportunity to better manage your online shop, both in terms of graphics view of functionality. Categories, modules, customer area, shopping sales, space for user reviews, and the other will be everything in your hands.

That said, if you want to "attack" the web with your business and if you want that from the beginning your project has the potential to break through, you necessarily need a hosting service optimized.

If you make a tour on the forum and evaluate all the options provided by the various web providers here, you will see that there are a lot of options ... already, but which one to choose?

Web optimized for the appropriate CMS

As you know (if you do not know then should know) there are many different types of CMS on the internet and recognized as the own made software to manage various types of web activities.

You can also choose a CMS created for e-commerce but adapted this type of activity, it depends on your needs and requirements, for common requirements for an ecommerce site, more people are using WordPress with WooCommerce, or even Joomla, because it's easy to use and customize. However, My advice is to take advantage of a native solution, or a type of software that can ensure a high level of quality for the management of the online store. The best solution, in this sense, is certainly PrestaShop!

Necessary features of a hosting plan optimized for E-Commerce

Let's face it, if we refer to a small website with less traffic, Perhaps you are not difficult to choose a hosting plan for it like a shared or reseller package.

But if it comes to a business, a company that invests money on the web and do not want to run the risk of hitting inefficiencies that could be costly from an economic point of view, the choosing of hosting plan must possess certain characteristics and properties absolutely necessary basis.

What are these characteristics? Let's try to list a few points:

Safety: as just mentioned, talking about e-commerce, we refer to a type of extremely delicate activity. When you're dealing with customer data, and with the passage of money you can not afford to take chances. Safety must be ensured by a number of components, such as redundant connectivity, folders and HotLink Protection.
MySQL database: we have seen the example of PrestaShop, we emphasize how absolutely necessary the presence of the MySQL database, to get a complete picture of the movements of the online store, to manage your products and for all the operations you want to do.
Page Speed: important element of which you can (must) use, Page Speed is your business card to break through on the search engine. It is a module provided by Google Labs that allows you to put in place a series of automatic optimization of the web pages of your site and that will give you a higher loading speed, ranking factor in the SEO field.
Support: despite all the assurances of the case, some problems can always be there when it comes to web. Then the service provider will make sure that it is a fundamental element for a full assessment of you.
These features from which to a value assessment must be the cornerstones of the service Hosting E-Commerce you're going to buy.

Whether it PrestaShop or Magento (most suitable CMS for online shop of considerable size and that requires a certain degree of authority for the operation), what matters are the performance and security of the hosting plan.

A good opportunity for your business

Another element that can give you a big hand for the management of your online business is the CDN, the network servers spread around the world that leads you to share content with being the fastest with your customers, maybe anywhere the planet.

To conclude our discussion on what things we need to start an ecommerce website, we can say this: creating and managing an online store is not something to be taken lightly, you must be well aware that you will have to do with economic movements and sensitive data of your customers.

You can not afford to make mistakes, carefully evaluate what we need to do to avoid problems in the future!

WordPress with Woocommerce is one of the simplest ways to get a store online.

Magento and ZenCart are quite popular choices among people who wish to start their own eCommerce business.
Specially magento which is open source and offers flexibility.

I agree with HostBasic , Magento is smartest way to launch an online store website.

WooCOMMERCE and Magento has made it much easy to create Ecommerce websites. You just have to install the CMS wrap over a theme and start showcasing your products. Let me know if you need any further help.

You can find a lot of free and paid eCommerece scripts at https://www.softaculous.com/apps/ecommerce

Hope that helps!?

If you want to use wordpress for the site then woocommerce is the solution for you. Since wordpress runs 60+% of all websites it is a great solution and continually updated.

From my research, woocommerce with Wordpress and shopify are both very good. Shopify also offers optimized hosting just for you ecommerce store.

I seen a beautiful design at http://zencart-template.com/art-store-theme

It depends on a few things...

How tech savvy are you?
If you know how to build a site, then WordPress with Woocommerce or Magento are good options.
Having said that, Magento was built with commerce in mind, so it's better at handling large quantities of products at giving that customer portal experience

WordPress would be easier to set up if you don't know much coding yourself. You can get a lot of WYSIWYG themes out there that would aid you. Magento, not so much from what I understand.

How many products & volume of traffic do you expect?
The first time costs of setting either of these may be overkill. Especially with Magento. They are both very capable systems to get a ecommerce site sorted, and gives you great flexibility. But if you're not selling much, WordPress may be the better and more straight forward option.

You could also look at managed providers of ecommerce websites like volusion, but the issues are that you're tied into their system. Monthly costs may outweight cost savings in long run, but it's more straight forward for now.

If you like the idea of WordPress with WooCommerce, but find the set up and build to be bit of a hassle, I believe places like Themeforest now have Managed WP options where they do it all for you...

There are quite a few solutions out there for doing this. Below is my write up based on the currently available free/open platforms. I'm talking about this from a purely long term ownership cost perspective.

At the moment, nothing beats Prestashop. The reason is pretty simple. Prestashop by default comes with a heck of a lot features pre-built into the installation which basically means you don't end up spending money every time you want a simple functionality added to your site. Right from inbuilt coupons, customer support modules, multi-store for multiple region custom store, super customized pricing and combinations for products, customizable shipment option etc.etc.etc. For a small to medium scale, honestly the only thing you will end up paying for additionally is maybe a theme and perhaps a usage based SMS integration.

Woocommerce is the worst in the lot when it comes to long term cost. Now, we love woocommerce, the simple way to set it up and a simple and easy to manage system, but that's about it. It is simple, anything else you want to do is almost always a $50 plugin. Something as simple as setting up condition based product combinations, you're going to have to spend money buying plugins. Woocommerce is unusable out of the box for anything other than a home based mom and pop type of business. While some might point out that there are a lot of free plugins available, from our experience, none of them except a few exceptional ones are worth their salt.

Magento is not for the faint of heart. There is a very steep learning curve and you have to invest considerable time and money to bring it upto the level of what something like Prestashop can offer out of the box. However, if you are looking to scale up over the next few years using the same platform, Magento would be the one to go with.

The thing about Opencart is a bit funny and sad at the same time. While there are a lot of free plugins out there, they are nowhere as good as the paid ones and the sad bit about opencart is that the core system is horribly designed. It is yet to modulize its components and everything is directly working on the core code and this is a huge problem because every time you fix something like to maybe get a plugin working, it breaks something else. You have to be painfully patient to work with open cart and know very well how to tinker with the core code.

Mujkanovic said:

I am planning to create a new ecommerce website for selling art paintings from some countries on the world. I want to know what do i need to create an eCommerce website for more convenient for my customers and easy to manage for myself?

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Hey There.

I'm late to the party, but have you made a decision for your plans?

I too will add a +1 for WooCommerce (with a slight bias), but for those that I have setup with WooCommerce...after a few questions and the client playing around with the Dashboard, they have been more than happy using it. It allows them to focus on promoting their items for sale, and not worry about the website.

If you do go with WooCommerce (WordPress), you will need to look into WordPress security to keep everything secure. Any questions and someone or a few of us can help steer you in the right direction.