The Host with the Most
If you'd rather not build your site yourself, there are many hosted web or e-commerce solutions that can help. Web-hosting companies generally offer a combination of site-building tools; product catalog tools; shopping-cart technology; payment, shipping and marketing strategies; tracking and reporting capabilities; domain registration; and hosting.
eBay offers a storefront solution called ProStores. ProStores--which is available to everyone, not just eBay sellers--offers a full-featured, customizable web store. Unlike eBay Stores, ProStores sites are accessed through a URL unique to the seller and have no eBay branding. ProStores sellers are responsible for driving their own traffic, and items on ProStores sites sell only at fixed prices. The cost of a ProStore ranges from about $7 per month with a 1.5 percent transaction fee to about $250 per month with a 0.5 percent transaction fee.
Hosted solutions generally start at about $30 to $40 per month, plus setup fees of up to $50 per month. Some companies also charge transaction fees. Keep in mind, $40 will only get you basic functionality--bells and whistles cost a few hundred dollars per month.
Jacquelyn Tran, founder and president of Perfume Bay Inc., a Huntington Beach, California, company that sells cosmetics, skin-care products, perfume and home fragrances on its website, uses a full-featured e-commerce service from Yahoo!. Tran started Perfume Bay in 1999 and now offers more than 30,000 types of products, with 2005 sales of $8 million. During startup, Tran hired a web designer to build her site. Her total startup cost was high, coming out to $50,000. "This included advertising, a custom-built shopping cart--everything," she says.
A few years later, Tran decided to sign on with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions (then called Yahoo! Stores). "The pro-gram was easy to use, fairly customizable with a lot of great features, and fully integrated," says Tran, 28. "This was very important because we depend on having a really easy-to-navigate site." She also found a web designer through Yahoo! to help set up the new site. Tran saw a difference almost immediately: "We got more orders," she explains.
Tran chose Yahoo! Merchant Solutions' most expensive offering: Yahoo! Merchant Professional, which costs $300 per month, plus a one-time setup fee of $50 and a fee of 75 cents per transaction. Hiring a web designer costs an additional $2,000 to $10,000. Still, that's a lot less than it cost Tran to set up her customized site. "Looking back," she says, "I wish I had gone to Yahoo! first."
Sebastian Moser, U.S. director of technical development at Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania-based 1&1 Internet, says that before you sign on, make sure your hosted e-solution offers:
- A full wizard-driven setup: Most merchants need a proper wizard-driven system that takes you from start to a fully operational, production-ready e-commerce storefront.
- Many templates: An e-commerce solution provider should have many different templates to meet the needs of its varied customers and their products.
- SSL encryption: The system should include the option of SSL encryption-a protocol for transmitting private docu-ments via the internet. This means your customers' credit card information and address is transmitted securely.
- A database-driven system: This allows a system to be inte-grated with your customer database, so you can send out promotional e-mails.
- Payment beyond paypal: PayPal serves the needs of a lot of e-tailers, but not all of them. The best hosted e-commerce vendors offer several payment gateways.
