There is a big range of shop builders offering different options at different price points available to UK ecommerce start-ups. But which one do you go for, read our list of seven major suppliers to help you decide.
Our selection of seven ecommerce shop builders:
Shopify:
This Canadian startup entered the market in 2006 and has been gaining momentum as quite a trendy option ever since.
There are over 100 themes for you to choose from and the ability to customise these further to create your own look. If you want to start your design from scratch Shopify has a team of website designers to help.
If you’re interested in tapping into the mobile market there are responsive themes available which will make sure your site renders perfectly on any device. The service also has a mobile check-out function which you can use.
In terms of pricing, there is a monthly fee depending on which package you chose – this starts at £19 for a basic site and goes up to £115 for the unlimited package.
Moonfruit:
One of our homegrown stars, Moonfruit was a website builder originally and added the shop building function shortly before getting bought by Hibu (the company formally known as Yell).
The product is aimed at small scale retailers (up to 10000 products) and is incredibly user friendly. Prices start at £8 per month and go up to £25. It also has the functionality to create mobile optimised sites with a responsive theme and mobile checkout.
“The Moonfruit ShopBuilder tool allows you to seamlessly integrate an online store with your website,” says Joe White, Co-founder and COO/CFO at Moonfruit.
“We wanted to make something that would not only work in Moonfruit, but take away the pain of building multiple shops for different channels – so you can really just ‘publish once, be everywhere’. This means that once you build your web store, it’s automatically optimised for mobile and you can publish it directly on to Facebook too!
“Moonfruit shops are PayPal friendly and easily configurable; a wide range of design templates exist to help you make a big impression with your products, without the hassle. What’s more, we don’t enforce shop-specific fees so shop-owners can really make the most of their profits.”
Magento:
Considered to be one of the most popular solutions, a survey by Alexa found that some 20% of sites use Magento. The UK branch is branded as MagentoGo.
It has an endless list of features, so much so that it created a marketplace for Magento add-ons called Magento Connect where you can see extensions to customise your store. There are thousands of choices making it the largest ecommerce application marketplace in the world.
As with many shop builders there is a useful blog to keep you up to date with the market but the company acts as something of a hub for the ecommerce community be offering webinars, video tutorials and a user forum where you can speak to other customers. Monthly prices range from £9.99 and reach £79.99.
Volusion:
Hailing from Austin in Texas, Volution has been around for over ten years and has some impressive clients such as Disney, Motorola and Deloitte.
It’s PCI certified and is listed on Visa’s approved provider list. It has many different services which you can add to your shop including live chat, social media tools and newsletters.
It has something called Fraud Score which, whilst it isn’t free, identifies behaviour associated with fraudulent orders before processing them. Creating a mobile and Facebook store is part of all of the packages rather than premium functions which makes it a fantastic all-rounder.
As with many of the other shop builders there is a monthly fee which was a wide range of £9 per month to £119. There are lots of free templates to chose from but some of the best are paid for.
Venda:
Born in the UK and now with offices in New York and Bangkok also, Venda has clients ranging from Tesco to Jimmy Choo. It was founded in 2001 by Dan Wagner – one of the UK’s first internet entrepreneurs.
An exponent of ‘Convergent Commerce’ – the Venda platform will support your shop through as many channels as possible such as the web, mobile and social networks. Prices are available on request.
“Venda has delivered more commerce sites and transactions to world-leading retailers and brands than any other cloud (SaaS) commerce provider,” Venda claims on its site.
“Venda has evolved from a best-in-class eCommerce pioneer to a global provider of end-to-end multi-channel commerce solutions. Venda’s reliability, scalability and flexibility suit customers across many industries – from global big box retailers and fashion leaders to electronics and media companies.”
SellerDeck:
Another UK-owned ecommerce provider, SellerDeck targets small to mid-sized businesses with its shop building software. Founded in 1996 the company certainly has the history behind its platform.
SellerDeck sells software rather than a cloud-based service which differentiates it from others. Prices range from £499 – £5,000 for the software.
“SellerDeck 2013 is a complete ecommerce software package that gives you everything you need to get your online shop up and delivering in a day,” says Phil Rothwell, marketing director at SellerDeck.
“Merchants like it because it sits on their Windows desktops, giving them full control over key components such as their customer and stock databases, hosting, payments, fraud detection and customer feedback without having to rely on third-party, cloud-based solutions. Even if your internet connection goes down, your shop can carry on taking orders.”
The platform doesn’t yet support mobile optimisation but it does have a few designer partners, ITQ Solutions and Teclan, who can make the SellerDeck store optimised for mobile use.
123-Reg:
Having started out as a web hosting service selling domain names, 123 – Reg soon branched out into the world of ecommerce offering users the ability to build and manage their online shops using its cloud-based platform.
“For customers who have just set up their online business, 123-reg is a great place to start,” says Richard Winslow, head of application hosting, 123-reg.
“Our packages offer customers everything needed to build and run an ecommerce website, catalogue, create a shopping baskets, payment and marketing. Setting up is easy. With a simple point and click set up, no technical knowledge is needed.”
Prices start at £9.99 per month and go up to £44.99.
Fantastic resource Gabby! Would you recommend Shopify to new sellers? The templates are really attractive there, is there a niche that particularly works well in this platform?
What provider would you recommend if you want to create multiple shop fronts e.g. Say your selling your products to schools and you need a different shop front for each one, though the back end can run off the same platform. We were looking at Word Press? Problem with some of the options above is there would be a charge for each shop, and with Spotify for example the cost is prohibitive.
If you are looking at multiple store fronts and you want to keep costs down you could simply set up one store on a hosted platform like shopify, bigcommerce, ash shop commerce etc. There are lots of benefits to these platforms in terms of security/anti-fraud measures/built in marketing features etc. which will save you a lot of time compared to having your own built from scratch. Then set up multiple single page word press sites on similar sounding domains on a separate account with one of the hosting companies. Each of these would take you straight into the shop via a ‘shop now’ button. I use use 5quid host , whose free plan might even do the job – if you need more space/bandwidth then it is only £5 per month and the customer support is second to none (I do not work for them – honest, I just think they are amazing!) . (http://www.5quidhost.co.uk/5348.html)
If possible try to keep the backend the same since administration and management will be easier.
If you simply want to have a different display for each school you could achieve this with an image or custom presentation within either the ad engine or the promotions engine.
If the products available are the same for each then the personalisation could be driven by the user login. eg each school as a different login and once logged it it shows their school name.
WordPress can handle different front-ends with ease HOWEVER it wants them to have separate content. This can lead to duplicated stock entries, problems with stock levels and it’s a bit of a kludge.
Netsuite have multi-store options if you really need them:
http://www.netsuite.co.uk/portal/uk/products/ecommerce/webstore.shtml
- perhaps a review could be added to a future update of this page?
If you have a specific question then you can mail them and ask the best way to deploy.
Please do share what you learn/decide to do!
Thanks Gabby,
I am wondering about MagentoGo, I thought this is just the on demand solution (SaaS) of Magento. Magento Community and Enterprise Edition is also available in the UK.
THX
Tom