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August 10th, 2008

With so many options for starting an online retail or sales site, the best way to get your bearings is simply to examine a few. There are some very small, limited options for a new site. If you just want to accept Paypal or Google Checkout, for example, you could simply dump www.fatfreecart.com into your site, blog, or even Myspace page. It handles the cart and checkout process, and is free. Although you can get a long way on such a solution, limiting yourself to Google Checkout and Paypal will slow your growth. Eventually, you’ll probably need to upgrade to a full-fledged hosted retail solution to accommodate continued expansion of your store.

Shopify (www.shopify.com) is one such solution. They’re based on Ruby on Rails, and several other open source projects. That means that there is an active development community behind the features. New features and improvements are added regularly, and they’re all based on an architecture that is inherently easy to scale. Best yet, they have a trial account option. This allows you to dive in, get a feel for what the store has to offer, and even process a few orders. Once you really get started, of course, you’ll have to upgrade to a real plan, but it’s very handy to be able to bring yourself up to speed without paying a dime.

Shopify’s system allows you to edit the site templates directly through their admin tool or run your site locally to allow you to mess with everything in the safety of your own computer. They have tons of tutorials, documentation and help links throughout their admin panel. They have tools that will help even a non-technical person make quick changes to their site. Want to add the price to the product preview? No problem, they give you the code to put in. Want to add a blog to your site? It takes about ten seconds to add a blog to your site.

In addition, all the templates are designed to have excellent SEO. They’ve already built in the HTML tags you’d want to use and you write in a syntax that’s similar to some blogging tools; you don’t need to know how to program a website at all. The CSS is all designed to make your site fast, reliable and the same across all browsers. You can do custom templates from the ground up, of course, but it’s very easy to start from one of their free templates and go from there.

How does Shopify stack up against Yahoo! Store? It’s a very important comparison, as Yahoo is one of the biggest hosted shopping solutions on the internet.

First, if your site becomes fabulously popular, Shopify’s Enterprise level plans have a lower transaction fee than Yahoo! Store. That can mean tens of thousands of dollars saved per year if you’re doing enough business. The downside is, however, that on a small site, the fees are slightly higher than their Yahoo counterpart.

Second, there’s a major difference in the way the site’s pages are generated. Yahoo’s templates are used to generate static pages. This means that dynamic content like up-to-date stock counts are very difficult to have added to your product pages. Shopify is a true dynamic platform and adding such content is usually one line of copy-and-paste code. Also, Shopify built Google Analytics directly into the platform, and it’s fairly easy to add your own third party widgets until your heart’s content.

Third, the pricing is a little different. Yahoo requires a small set up fee to start a new store. Shopify doesn’t, but as I mentioned has slightly higher transaction fees on small sites.

In general, you’ll find Shopify to be an easy-to-customize option. They have their own quirks that some users will like and others may not. However, their free trial makes it easy to prevent making a premature decision. It’s always nice to be familiar with the operation of your store before you have to pay for it, or before your customers start ordering from you! In either case, you can only make sales if you have a site going and most options are fast to implement. Good luck!