Does anyone have any suggestions for a good e-commerce solution?

My sister has a nice little side business of making greeting cards and invitations and she's currently selling them by word of mouth, but she'd like to get a more formal internet presence to sell online.

Because the cards are high-quality and made by hand, they normally sell to a higher end customer. The web presence would have to cater to those customers so it can't be a cookie-cutter eBay store, it needs to have a little more style.

Although I have a background in programming, I'm not about to reinvent the wheel for her. There have got to be 11tybillion good sites out there. I don't mind doing a little tweaking of the site layout templates if that's required, but I'm not going to code something from the ground up.

Thanks!

Dan

 

You could just get a host and use one of the off-the-shelf shopping carts. Some are open source and free.

Two that come to mind are osCommerce and Zen Cart.

 

Interesting, I'll look into those.

 

We used this for a while:

http://www.netsuite.com/portal/home.shtml

 

There's always etsy. Down-sides are that it's somewhat lacking in style, and they take a percentage. BUT (and the only reason I even mention it)I know lots of people who browse the site because they like hand-crafted goods, so she may get traffic that she wouldn't have otherwise. I've considered building an etsy store even though I have the smugmug site..

 

^ We should double-check with her, but I'm pretty sure she already has something set up on Etsy.

EDIT: Just looked...yes, she does.

 

One thought that just occurred to me, is if Dan's sister went with a standard web hosting service and then did a roll-your-own e-commerce setup, wouldn't she still need to independently acquire and manage an account with a payment processing service?

 

Yes, the cart software can interface with the payment gateway. The 800 lb gorilla of the payment gateway world is authorize.net. Paypal payment services is another big popular one.

I'm no expert in these things, but I do recall that Zen Cart can interface directly with Google Checkout. But that's all I can say on that because I've never implemented it.

 

^OsCommerce and some of the other open source solutions already have a lot of hooks built in to accommodate various payment processing services--including some of the major US banks, PayPal, Google Checkout, etc.

Personally, being a developer, I like:

Joomla CMS with the VirtueMart component

and

Magento

 

Lots of good info here. Thanks for the tips everyone.

Yes she has been using Etsy, but they're fairly expensive for what they provide, and their templates are rather cookie-cutter.

I've been doing some reading today about Zen Cart with Google Checkout, and it seems like a pretty good combo, but it also seems like it would take a lot of effort on my part to get her up and running. I don't mind making a few tweaks here and there, but I don't have the time to put together a quality site from the ground up for her. I've already been drafted into doing the product photos...

 

My wife swears by Etsy