I have been using Freeway for a couple of years making sites for clients and friends, getting quite good. Now I have got a new enquiry for making a web shop. Here I am more or less green. We’re talking here a fairly simple set up with around 50 different products, with shopping cart and payment possibilities, of course. I’ve been browsing around a little and it seems things can get very complicated.
I am not into coding, that’s why I do Freeway.
Is there someone out there that can explain, in layman’s terms, some alternatives, some dos and don’ts?
With that many products the built in FW shop actions are perfectly good enough for the task.
Where things can get complicated is when the Client wants to edit/upload new products themselves.
It is important to clarify with the client is exactly how much control (if any) they want - or whether that will be left to you.
There are literally hundreds (nay thousands) of Cart solutions out there some of which are free.
Another important thing is to future proof yourself. No point in a simple system just now for 50 odd products if later he wants to sell thousands.
And be realistic - dont jump into something that you are not sure you can deliver - so if he tells you that he has an expanding business with big plans which will require an all singing, dancing system with inventory management, invoicing control and which links into his accounts package.
Then walk away now rather than getting into an out of control situation.
After what you wrote I will go ahead with this. I have plenty of time for trying and failing, depending on this:
The site is already up, but it is so ugly, unprofessional, complicated and only half functional that that is why they want to do a fresh start. Can I register the domain with Mal’s e-commerce, do all the site set up in Freeway without interfering with the existing site/domain and then upload everything when I doom it ready to go?
The first web site contains the same products year round, I occasionally created more pages in Freeway to add more products. This is linked to Mals shopping cart, premium version. I use Paypal to accept payments. It’s all quite straightforward to set up and works very well. This works great if your the only one adding products, changing details etc.
The second site uses Ecwid, this is a shop and cart solution which will allow your client to log in to add or change product details. It’s free for 100 products. You design the general look of the site in free way and add a couple of lines of ‘Markup’ to build the shop into your site. This also works quite well though I prefer the earlier option.