Ask News YC: What's the cheapest/quickest/easiest way to set up an ecommerce store?

3 pointsgsiener3 comments

I'm sure a lot of you have done the research - what's it like to sell something online, and what are the pitfalls?

Yahoo Store, OSCommerce and there is a Ruby one...I forget it.

Everything about selling online isn't fun. Customer Service, Fulfillment, Choosing Shipping partners, Choosing Payment Processing, and the biggest pain: Getting Customers. Tweaking pages for higher conversion, stuff like that.

Yahoo Store is an off site solution, OSCommerce is a local hosted Free shopping cart, just like ZenCart. They are needlessly complex and big if all you need is a very basic online store. I think http://www.shopify.info is the Ruby off-site hosted one, or at least it looks more Web 2.0. All of the off-site ones have big monthly charges + a transaction fee in addition to the credit card processing fees.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787

If you are: - just starting out - not a hacker - want a real commerce site ..then you you have only one choice: PG's Viaweb, now known as Yahoo Store. The Entry level version costs around $40 per month with a $50 one time setup fee. You cannot go wrong: http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce

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