What type of ecommerce website design solution best suits your business
by Peter Day

This is the "do it yourself" e commerce website design solution. There are lots of free and cheap, off the shelf shopping cart ecommerce web site packages around, like Zen cart, OsCommmerce, Joomlah, Word Press and Cube Cart to name just a few. However you are stuck with a limited design choice and basic shop features. They do work very well, are secure and have the ability to be modified with add-ons created by a huge developer base. You can modify these e commerce websites to suit your businesses needs yourself, although to do so you need to have a good understanding of open source software language coding like PHP, MYSQL, JAVA and HTML, or the time to learn them. For most business owners this is not very practical, as it consumes valuable resources and time resulting in an ecommerce web site that may appear amateurish and doesn't present your business in a professional manner.

Option 2. Pay for a template based ecommerce website design with shopping cart.

This is the cheapest of the paid ecommerce website solutions. Its very much a ´do it yourself´ e commerce web site design solution. You choose a website layout design from a list of pre-designed templates, choose the colour scheme, type style and add some content. Its only advantage is, after paying a setup fee, you pay month by month, so if your unsure how successful your online business will be, in the short term you not spending lots of money. However in the long term over a period of a year or two, it can be more cost effective to have chosen one of the other paid ecommerce web site solutions. Some template based e commerce website design companies will insist on a minimum term, so this will need to taken into account when calculating the total cost of this ecommerce website solution. The disadvantages of using this type of ecommerce web site design solution can be numerous. The most noticeable is you are tied to this particular company. If they suddenly go out of business, so do you! Many will not allow you to have a complete backup of your websites data, due to the way these types of ecommerce web sites share resources with each other. They might only allow you to download a copy of your customer list and order history, but not your product information. These type of e commerce websites also tend be very slow to load. This can be annoying to shoppers trying to buy your products and ultimately result in lost sales. An obvious disadvantage is you cant choose to have your ecommerce website hosted elsewhere. One very important consideration is these type of ecommerce website designs are not search engine friendly. Search engines can find it difficult to crawl the site and list pages and products properly. You also may not be able to use sitemaps and robot.txt files effectively, or at all. This can be disastrous for your online business when the whole purpose of your e commerce web site is to make sales!

Option 3. Pay for a customised e commerce web site that uses specialised proprietary technology.

By far the most expensive way to get an e commerce web site and for the majority of small businesses, its not an option. Often called the ´bespoke´ ecommerce web site solution, these e commerce websites claim to be built from the ground up to your specifications. However in reality the hard code, or the nuts and bolts, of the ecommerce design has already been created by the design company using for example, ASP/VBscript language which is Microsoft licensed software and then modified to design an e commerce website to suit your requirements. The advantage for big businesses is your ecommerce web site database can be connected directly to your companies internal database, which may make it easier to control stock inventories and customer accounts. However, as this type of ecommerce website uses proprietary e commerce website coding specific to that design company, it forever locks you in to that company which can be problematic. If they go out of business, what will you do. If you want changes made, you have to get them to do it. What if they decide to change the programming language your web site was designed with to something else, leaving you with an ecommerce website that cant be updated, or grow with your business. You may even be required to always have your ecommerce website hosted with them, perhaps forcing you to put up with an e commerce web site that is slow and unreliable.

Option 4. Pay to have your ecommerce website designed using existing open source, royalty free shopping cart technology.

This is the ecommerce website solution offered by Your online shop. Its a great compromise between the expensive ´bespoke´ proprietary design website solution and using a free off the shelf shopping cart solution. The advantage of customising and modifying an existing open source e commerce web site design like OsCommerce, is you are not paying to re-invent the wheel. With the right design company, you get the look, features and functionality ´bespoke´ proprietary ecommerce design offers, along with the peace of mind knowing that the ecommerce website design uses existing open source technology based on a secure and proven e commerce engine, such as OsCommerce. Also you have the freedom to have your ecommerce web site hosted where you want and even modified by another website design company. Be sure though, to keep a current copy of your site and importantly a current copy of the SQL Database. Any reputable design company will make these available to you, because without these you wont have a business!