After installing, customizing, adding contents and pulling hair out from frustration for a number of e-commerce platforms I have settled into one platform…but first let me review what I tried. Magento was my favorite of the free platforms but on a shared hosting environment it was very slow. Magento will be amazing for the person that wants a free platform and has some jink to get a dedicated or semi-dedicated hosting solution. OSCommerce was the one platform I spent the least amount of time working with. The back-end of the OSCommerce solution was not very intuitive and seemed sloppy. Early on I thought I would be happy putting in time to customize the chosen platform as needed…this platform made me uphappy. WP e-Commerce was my final attempt at a free e-commerce solution. It is built on top of the Word Press blog platform. Everything about this solution was fun and easily customizable. I had the store setup within a few minutes and making section and items was just like making a blog post or a page. Unfortunately, after I got things in place and ready to add products I decided I did not want to work with a free solution anymore.

The time I put into customizing, installing and troubleshooting had left a sour taste in my mouth and I wanted something canned that I was familiar with and could make changes often within seconds. In comes Yahoo! Small Business. I guess it helps that I work for a company that specializes in designing and customizing the Yahoo! platform. My only real reservation was the $39.95 monthly cost. Aside from that I have not really seen any issues with the platform and its feature set. Setup took a few minutes and I was in there making modifications and slicing my mockups within a day.

So my goal is to have the site live and taking orders (hopefully) within two weeks. I need to get our inventory together, take pictures, write descriptions, set prices and do some final testing them BeadsandQuilts.com will be fully operational.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 5:44 am and is filed under Daily Life, E-commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.