Online Store Systems (a.k.a. Shopping Carts)
There are many online “shopping cart” systems, some better than others. The systems we recommend are easy to update and have fairly low recurring costs. Equally important, the store systems we recommend hold your customers’ confidence by maintaining the branding of your site and by making it clear to the visitor that the store has the security features needed to protect their credit card numbers and other sensitive information.
At Vermont Design Works, we recommend and install various online store systems, each of which is designed for clients with different needs.
Basic Store
Pluses
- Inexpensive and easy to use
- Part of your site rather than a third-party system
- Credit card account transaction fees are usually lower than the transaction fees charged by PayPal.
Minuses
- Only suitable for a small number of products
- If you expand your product offering significantly, you will have to upgrade to a larger shopping cart system.
If you want to have your own credit card merchant account instead of using PayPal, and you have only a small number of products, we can build a single-page store for your website. With this basic store, every time you receive an order, an email will be sent to you notifying you of the order and giving you an order number. After receiving the email, you will go to a special administrative page on your website and log in to download the order.
The cost of adding a basic store to your website is extremely low, as are the recurring fees.
In addition, because the basic store is part of your website (i.e. your visitors will not be diverted to a third-party site), they will feel confident that their purchase is secure. We further increase visitors’ confidence by making your store have the same “look and feel” as the rest of your site. This is important, because we have found that when customers stay on the same site to make their purchases, they are less likely to “bail out” before they actually buy.
Vermont Design Works Full Online Store System
Pluses
- Powerful features, which can be customized for additional functionality
- Low monthly fees; part of your site rather than a third-party system
- Comparatively very inexpensive.
Minuses
- May not be cost-effective for businesses with only a few products (for small stores, the basic store or PayPal may be better).
Vermont Design Works has developed a full online store system that is flexible, powerful, and much less expensive than most eCommerce systems currently on the market.
With our online store system, you will be able to manage your inventory, specify a variety of shipping options, and update your product listings yourself. You will also be able to have your customers log in to their account, so that they do not have to enter in their personal information each time. In addition, the login feature can be used to offer both retail and wholesale prices, with wholesale prices being visible only to the members you specify.
As with the basic store system, the full online store will promote buyer confidence by being consistent in “look and feel” with the rest of your site, and by being an integral part of your site instead of a third-party store site.
Our online store system has many advanced features and can be customized to your specifications – please ask us for more information!
PayPal Shopping Cart
Pluses
- Low price; no monthly fees
- Easy and inexpensive to set up and update.
Minuses
- Only available if PayPal is the only payment option offered on your site.
PayPal comes with a no-fee shopping cart. To set up the shopping cart system, we add PayPal “Buy Now” buttons to the list of products on your site. When visitors click these buttons, they will be taken to a PayPal checkout page. The shopping cart is comparatively easy to set up, so that you will also save a little on programming fees for your website compared with the programming fees for setting up other online stores. You will be able to update the products in your store yourself, or you can ask us to do it for you.
PayPal allows you to customize the “look and feel” of your shopping cart, so that even though it is a third-party system, visitors will be confident that they are still connected to your site.
The PayPal shopping cart system also computes shipping costs, and will allow you to purchase postage online and print out shipping labels.
The PayPal shopping cart system is a good choice for low-volume eCommerce sites because it charges fees by the transaction, rather than by the month.
Note that you can use the PayPal shopping cart only if PayPal is the only online payment option on your site. If you later decide to upgrade to full credit card processing, you will no longer be able to use the PayPal shopping cart system and will have to invest in creating a new shopping cart system for your site.
Yahoo! Store
Pluses
- Many powerful features, plus access to excellent advertising.
Minuses
- High monthly fees.
Many web merchants have chosen Yahoo! Store as their shopping cart solution. Yahoo! Store charges a setup fee, monthly premiums for merchants ranging from $39.95 to $299.95, and a transaction fee of .75% to 1.5%. However, this fee includes site hosting, and the tools and services offered by Yahoo are comprehensive. They include a full, user-editable shopping cart that can handle a large number of products, an inventory management system, free consulting for one month, and discounts on listings in Yahoo!Shopping, a major online shopping portal. The monthly fees are high, but the discount advertising on Yahoo! makes the Yahoo! Store extremely worthwhile for some businesses.
If you wish, you can move your entire site over to Yahoo so that your site and your store will have the same domain name. If you choose to host your site elsewhere, you will have to have a different domain name for your store. In addition to customer confidence issues, this will mean that you will have to pay for hosting and annual registration for two domain names.
Depending on your credit card merchant account, you may be able to arrange for online credit card processing directly through Yahoo.
To find out more about Yahoo! Store, please visit http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/com/.
| Online Store Option | Overview |
|---|---|
| Basic Store | Excellent choice for small online businesses that already take credit cards – or plan to. $75 annual fee plus $10/month for secure data transmission and IP hosting (charged in addition to regular hosting fee). Setup and programming of store vary depending on functionality, but typically are well under $1000. |
| Full Online Store by Vermont Design Works | $250 starter fee, plus $75 annual fee and $10/month for secure data transmission and IP hosting (charged in addition to regular hosting fee). Setup and programming price depends on functionality desired and number of products sold. |
| PayPal Shopping Cart | Free shopping cart system from PayPal; free set-up by Vermont Design Works with purchase of website; no monthly fees, although transaction fees of 2.9% + $0.30 will be assessed. May be used only if PayPal is your site’s only online payment processing method. |
| Yahoo! Store Merchant Starter package | $50 starter fee, $39.95/month, plus 1.5% transaction fee, plus setup and programming by Vermont Design Works (varies according to functionality desired). |
| Yahoo! Store Merchant Standard package | $50 starter fee, $99.95/month, plus 1% transaction fee, plus setup and programming by Vermont Design Works (varies according to functionality desired). |
| Yahoo! Store Merchant Professional package | $50 starter fee, $299/month, plus .75% transaction fee, plus setup and programming by Vermont Design Works (varies according to functionality desired). |
Vermont Design Works can also set up and maintain other third-party store systems – ask us for details!
Note: To calculate the approximate cost of a complete eCommerce system, add the cost of your preferred payment processing method and your preferred shopping cart system. For a simple table showing which online payment processing systems and shopping cart systems are compatible with one another, please see the next page.