Opening a Webstore in addition to my eBay Store

[entertainmentsolutionssuperstore]

I have had an eBay Store since November 2010. I fell I did just fine becoming a PowerSeller after 6 months and realize that I will qualify as a Silver Power seller next month.

I think it is now time to add my own web store and I would welcome your input. I am not a programmer but do have a basic understanding of HTML. What software etc. do you suggest?

I am leaning towards purchasing reasonable software if required so my only cost would be webhosting.

To give you a bit of idea of my sales... most of the items I have sold range from the US$50 - US$250 and 60 - 70 percent of my sales are to US buyers.

I think I need the ability to do combined shipping as well as combined quantities on orders.

Thank you in advance for your input.

David

[paulgg132]

Wow! Good job David. I too am just a few thousand away from going Silver and am facing the same decisions. My frustration is that all the software I can find costs lots of money and will take much more time to set up and coordinate the shopping cart with the check out process. I have 400 listings and often have 10 to 15 items to combine in a transaction. In ebay my customers can combine their own orders with the click of a button and the S&H is pre-calculated so they can pay and I just ship. I have customers who have spent thousands over the years and we have never communicated once other than their items shipped notices.

There are quite a few Power Sellers who have opened their own store so I hope they can offer some good choices please. Are you out there Pierre?

[pierrelebel]

"There are quite a few Power Sellers who have opened their own store so I hope they can offer some good choices please. Are you out there Pierre?"

I was in the mail order business and had my website BEFORE I joined eBay nearly 13 years ago.  My marketing plan, from the beginning, was to use eBay to acquire new customers (collectors and dealers) to eventually move to my website where prices were lower.

As I reached retirement age, I closed my website last year. Since then, I have been disposing of my excess inventory and continue selling a limited range of products through my eBay store in semi-retirement.

The cost of hosting a website is reasonable ($20/$30 a month).  Most reliable host offer services to set up a website.  Yes, it costs some money but we all know that in business you have to spend money to make money and, eventually, you get what you pay for.

If the goal to have your own website is to sell an extra $1,000 a month to "save" $100 in fees at eBay, quite frankly, it may not be worth it.  It does cost money, lots of money, to drive customers to your own site, divide your time and efforts between two sites (your own and eBay), etc...

On the other hand, if you run a business and budget additional sales of at least $10,000 a month, invest the money to do it right.

Good Luck.

[godboma]

I have been using x-cart for almost 2 years now. I am pleased with the product as it is low cost (around 300$) and unlimited. You are buying a license and also the source code. So you can modify the cart to fit your particular needs if you know PHP and HTML. If not, there is a lot of third party out there that will do the job for you.

That cart can of course combined shipping and even use realtime shipping quote. My version is 2 year old so the newest have a little bit more features than mine but I invested too much time in modifications that I do not want to upgrade at this point.

You can see my store by googling my user name. For me it was the best and cheapest solution. There is a lot of third party that will sell you a skin for your cart. Mine is a standard one that came with the cart.

I started the store by using low cost web hosting and that was a bad decision. Slow response speed, random error while browsing the store, etc. Very slow customer services... Now I pay more (36$ per month) but no worries anymore and no complaints from customers. Make sure to select a hosting company that knows the cart you are going to use on their system. They will optimize the server accordingly.

Good luck!