What is the Cheapest, Cost effective Ecommerce Platform?

Mithchen, Tibolli.NET support asked me to send them icons and support website address, so I didn't proceed with that.
I attached the exact application form that they sent to me. You can take a look.

 

I see there's an image of hostgator so can you tell me if this is what you got from them?

 

Yes it's what I've got from them.

 

Wordpress is Cheapest, Cost effective Ecommerce Platform

 

My 2 cents on this is that if you need a free option out of the gate you may not be ready to run an eCommerce store. And I say that in general not to anyone in particular.

No matter what platform you choose you will need a minimum of 1500k that you can afford to lose every month in testing your advertising unless you go the SEO route which will take longer.

Most eCommerce strategies depend in some way on paid advertising as the backbone of traffic generation. Whether it be Facebook ads or Google or whatever platform you choose.

So coming from someone who has run eCommerce stores and ad campaigns. I would suggest you really look at what kind of budget you have to work with before you go down this road. The old adage it takes money to make money still applies here.

As far as the Free idea, from my experience FREE usually means substandard and best and dangerous at least so I would be careful with any FREE options that are out there.

Also as a new business owner wouldn't you want to stack the playing cards in your advantage as much as possible?
companies like Tesla, Radio Shack, The Los Angeles Lakers use Shopify.

It is a proven quality platform, with no kinks in the presentation. You need to have as much signals of quality in your eCommerce business as you can you have seconds to win or lose a customer.

I think that for a new person Shopify would be something I would look at if you were doing pure eCommerce because a lot of the backend work is either automated for you or done by the shopify platform itself.

Is it perfect? No it's not it has it's pro's and cons.

However there is a ton of backend work that goes on with running a shopify store, and it can save you a lot of time, time you will need to keep your store profitable.

Unless you have a specific skill set, niche, and products that you have great experience with I would suggest you take a hard look at Shopify if you have troubles with Tibolli.

I would also advise you to look at other ways of making money online first before getting into eCommerce. A better option would be to build a freelance business first to give you the capital to invest in an eCommerce store so that you have the financial, emotional, energy, and time capital to do it correctly from the start.

I see the word luck thrown around a lot and really that plays less a role than most think, the obvious situation for new eCommerce owners is that they are new therefore don't have experience.

There is very little in life you can succeed in without having experiencing outside of making kids. Without experience human beings suffer, look at any sports league and you can see this play out all over the world.

There is a learning curve, sometimes there is the rare exception and in reality even those guys may have had help or secret financial backing, to purposefully turn them into a "GURU", just to sell the latest and greatest idea.

I learned this myself the hard way, And this is also something you may never receive, you will have to learn in the trenches like the rest of us, which takes time and you might fail once or twice or 10 times.

One thing about the tibolli option is that you can learn some things and experiment at a very low cost since the platform is free and you're just running ads.

However if you can afford 29$ a month for a Shopify account you need to boost your operating captial first imho.

So overall really you have to decide what's best for your situation Woocommerce, Shopify, Magento etc...

And also things change what may be best today won't be tomorrow so also wouldn't get set on one specific platform but keep and open mind and your eyes open.

Cheers

 

Thanks for detailed and critical analysis. However, I would say that it takes time to get things on the go. So planning budget at an initial stage without even considering the element of perpetuity is not a good option.

Now when it comes to the words then $29 for a month may not be that much but when I accumulate $29 and multiply it with 12 then it gets huge and each year this one keeps on coming.

Proceeding further ahead, I would say that if I pay certain percentage of my sales to any platform then what's the purpose of paying monthly subscription. For instance if hosting platform is asking me to get even 2.5% this means that I have to pay portion to them, considering this portion small, however, again on aggregation that becomes too much.

So why is that portals are asking for monthly subscriptions, if they are already taking portion from my transaction.

 

Hello Mithchen,

I am giving you some honest advice from someone who has run a store and done thousands in sales. The situation that you are in right now is that you don't even know what you don't know, watching a football game on TV is very different from playing in the actual game.

Yes, these hosting companies are asking for a percentage because they are providing a service and also automating things that take time and effort to get done in your backend business.
The reason is is that they are a business and they are acting accordingly, businesses take your money for a service there is no getting around that.

For instance Shopify has many major companies using it so it provides a valuable service that even companies with large budgets capable of hiring a team and creating their own store use. That should tell you something right there.

And the 29$ a month is just the beginning once you get the store open you will need to purchase apps to optimize your stores for instance you will need these at the very least to start:

-Email Auto Responder(20$+)
-Abandon Cart Protector(10$+)
-Optin Capture Form(10$+)
-Order Lookup Tracker(10+)

Not to mention your advertising budget.

So just right there you are at 90$ a month(On Shopify)

Is it perfect? No not at all
Is it fair? It is what it is

I'm not sure how perpetuity has anything to do with it, you need to understand that you are starting a business. And that means that there are services and expenses you will have to pay. Ultimately what you do decide to pay for is your "The Business Owners Decision".

You need to really consider if you have the operating capital to start and run an eCommerce store. Like any business you will need to invest some money if you don't have it that's fine you can always find a way to get starting capital.

Again I get the feeling that you are not quite ready to take the eCommerce plunge I would suggest you make some money online in other ways first and build your skills. And in the meantime really think about what kind of eCommerce business you want to have.

It is very competitive and you really need to have a handle on a multitude of skill sets to make a store successful, especially these days.

I understand you want to make money and maybe quit your job and travel and all that stuff, I get it i've done it it's great but there are pitfalls if you don't really know what your doing.
Also the eCommerce market has become saturated with sub-standard stores that are giving smaller businesses a black eye.

All that crap you see on Youtube is garbage and isn't going to work long term if at all. Again I would build up more operating capital and learn the ropes of eCommerce a little more before jumping in.

And another tip stay away from really expensive courses and "Gurus"hold on to your startup capital.

Cheers

 

Hi again and once again as per my expectation you got really well and detailed answer.
Knowing the fact that I am new into all such stuff and I understand that its a strategic decision that is why I am spending a lot of time in doing R&D.
At the moment, I have got my store on some platform. So I would like to know you opinion on it.
I wonder, if you could give it a look and let me know how it looks. Even it if does not do well then I don't mind as I am just new and I have not made any payment or anything for that.

 

Sure PM me if you would like to keep your store private. Don't worry about failing that is how it is everyone will fail multiple times before getting success. It's called learning nothing wrong with that.

 

you can also use ecwid their platform is good and easy for beginers

 

1. What is the Cheapest, Cost effective Ecommerce Platform?
I would say Shopify. At around 40$ / month you can have a really good site with nice plugins, easy to use and with a LOT of tutorials.
2. How can I make sure that my buyer gets a receipt with my E-Store's name and the price that I show in my E-store, not the real wholesale price?
You can ask the supplier if he can do this.
3. or is it possible to not send any receipt to my buyer so he remains unknown of drop shipping, the real supplier, and the real price?
Yes. You have to message your supplier and tell him yu are dropshipping his product and you would like if he won't put anything else in the package besides the product. Be careful, there are some that don't like the idea of dropshipping.

 

Thanks jilogan for boosting my moral and thanks to every other guy who have presented their valuable feedback. And I don't mind mentioning my store. Here's the link optifeets.tibolli.net and I am glad that initially I got something for free. Now I am just curious about my mobile application that is on its way and will get it soon.

 

ROFL - I have seen some stores spending $200+ on apps...

Shopify is only a shell that is 100% dependent on outside apps....

One would think Shopify could be better by building some of these apps
that you spend your hard earned money on month after month....

I guess you could skirt by for a while only using free apps, but at some
point, you will want to build your elist which should be top priority, then you will
need a good app that will help you reduce abandoned carts, however, the apps
that you need to save your ass, and help you make money will cost you $$$

yea i know, you seen those "other" ecom sites making $1,000s of dollars, and you
want to be just like them, but lets just get real, you probably have almost zero
experience running an estore much less Shopify that is very app dependent; If you do
not know what you are doing, and you are not already making money out of the gate,
then all you will see is a loss by running shopify month after month, after month....

with all the saturated junk online stores out there, and everyone and their family
running fb ads; It will be very difficult for your store to get off the ground, and honestly
next to impossible if you walk into shopiy blind as a bat, and expecting riches overnight.

but hey, you never know, you might get lucky, right?
You will not know unless you try, but know what you are
getting into before you start complaining that you are spending
money on this app, or that app as shopify is a money milking machine.

 

Cheap doesn't always give you the best. If you are really committed to making your market grow faster., try to make a bold move. As what I have searched on google. The best platform would be either magento or shopify.

 

Why you run behind cheap other than advance? Don't you like your website is more safe? Free are not much secure than paid. So my advice is that just use paid then free if you will get your business more longer.

 

I had experience with Fast Spring. In terms of cost-effectiveness they are highly recommended

 

Well it's not about money or anything. All it takes what suits you most. I wonder, why we've developed a notion that we cannot get something incredible against no money at all. For a second let's assume that free is not an option then why do every single platform will offer you to try them for free and then make things on the go.
So why not to have such a thing that can come in handy for the whole life and even not demanding you anything in return.

 

When you are choosing which platform to build your site on you may want to think a bit about the future. If you are likely to want to be able to connect your store to other things (like Amazon, accounting software etc) then you will want to choose a platform that lets you do that easily.

If you want to continue to sell on Amazon and you want a quick and easy way to transfer your products from your Amazon account across to your new site, you might want to have a look at Expandly.

Expandly allows you to list very quickly to both Amazon and your web shop. You list in Expandly and push that listing to Amazon and your own website. Inventory management across both is easy. When you sell something on Expandly it downs your stock on your website. You can view all your orders in one place, create cross-channel picklists and bulk mark your orders as shipped. You can even compile all your orders for upload to accounts. It isn't expensive ($30 a month / £20 mth).

 

Hi there! I recommend that you visit this website to learn more about e-commerce strategies. I learned a lot from this website!

 

What is e-Commerce Strategy?

E-Commerce Strategy refers to a methodology that internet marketers particularly developed to relief the management activities of e-commerce websites to set all resources to optimize the entire operations to achieve common goals. Meanwhile, through many researches in technology development, customer behavior, online business development, and supply chain development, IM experts found a number of brilliant e-commerce strategies that can be implemented in this digital age.

Make Use of E-Commerce Strategies to Grow Your Business

Taking from some yearly forecasts from the eMarketer for a few years ago, the retail e-commerce sales of the United States was estimated have made sales approximately $270 billion and have sales increased approximately 16 percent per year. The eMarketer also estimates that the annual growth (CAGR) of entire United States’ e-Commerce sales by 2017 would be about $440 billion or would increase by 13.8 percent from 2016. Meanwhile, the interesting topic from that sales growth phenomenon is how startups and small e-commerce businesses can seize their market share from the booming of e-commerce in this digital age.

So we’ve summarized some (would be updated to add more) e-commerce strategies, which were taken from our own business analysis and other credible sources.


visit site: http://skillonpage.com/e-commerce-strategies/