Packages for creating an ecommerce site - Germany

So in my quest for world domination I am looking into creating an ecommerce site to potentially reach a wider audience with my product.

I am not an experienced programmer and have a limited budget so I would like to be able to do it myself, as I would also need to be the one to maintain it. Therefore I have been looking into packages that help a novice create such a site, with professional looking templates and some SEO capabilites. I have found one in english that I would love to use but unfortunately they have no german language option. I would definitely need to have a german language option as I think my first target would be the domestic market.

This is the package I have found http://www.mrsite.com/pro.asp

Does anyone know an alternative that may be better for creating multiple language sites?

www.jshop.co.uk

You "can" set things so that you have 1 backoffice, and both English and German orders are handled in the same place. But I prefer NOT to go this route. I always set up 100% standalone sites for .de and .com sites etc.

Why?

1. It makes handling of emails, queries, and sending of emails etc much easier to handle in different languages.

2. As you get bigger you can have dedicated staff handling 1 site and 1 language.

3. Google spiders the 2 sites seperately - this is VERY important and useful. You can fudge ways round this with JSHOP but it gets messy. Easier to just clone a site.

4. Different countries need different payment options. Germany needs options that make no sense to UK punters.

Good Luck.

p.s. And I guess #5 is you can PM me when you cant work something!!

£200,- for what looks like an oScommerce clone seems a lot of money to me, and you have to lay that money out before you know if you can work comfortably with the package.

Why not either set up your own oScommerce site (shop only) or set up Joomla and run Virtue Mart on it? At least then you can try out the packages for zero investment. If they're no good to you you can always go back to the "cost intensive" versions. If you do proceed with such a set up then you'll have 100% control over your business. I'd dread to think how pleased I'd be if I'd set up my thriving eCommerce project on JShop and they went to the wall, with all my data!

A Postscript: I've just looked again at the Mr Site feature lists. Look at these very closely to see just how little you get for your money.

YAP: I've just looked looked at the Admin Demo for JShop and at least it looks to be very thorough. It has just about everything you'd need to run an online retail set-up and has decent import/export facilities which are essential for maintaining control of your data. Standard formats too so you can transfer the data to most proprietary systems without a problem. Having said that I'd still suggest you look at the free options before investing money in an unknown quantity. While this looks very good it may well be OTT if you only have a handful of products to sell.

osCommerce is indeed an option - but it is open source software so the OP will need to get hands dirtier under the bonnet. With Jshop you do not have conflicting modules to select, and you have direct support etc. It's a bit more plug and play.

Horses for courses, but I would cough up the £200 personally but totally up to individuals.

p.s. It is not an unknown quantity!! They have been around a few years and I do a few hundred orders a day on Jshop websites. I have had a developer licence for about 5 years now on this one.

Edit: Other option is, depending on the products, to chuck 'em up on Amazon and Ebay. If you cannot sell them there you will struggle on your own website. Amazon is currently flying and much better than Ebay for any half decent products.

I used www.erol.co.uk to create an internet store in English. With little computer experience and a bit of trial and error the site looks OK (and people have ordered product!).

When looking around at what to use, I found a lot of internet hosting providers offer software to create and run e-shops. The software tended to be licenses of either epages (http://www.epages.com) or GS shopbuilder (https://www.gs-shopbuilder.de/shop/). 1and1.co.uk offers the epages package which allows english and german languages on the pro package (18.99 a month). I considered this, but didn't like it as you have to be online to create the store.

Let me know which one you go for, and if it is any good.

Thanks for the replies so far, I'm going to need to do some more reading. The JShop does look really interesting, especially coming from JE, who I believe must know his stuff on this! 200 as an outlay seems like a reasonable investment given that it's a package I can use out of the box. I have so much to do that I don't think I can commit the time to going down the more in depth route myself

Keep em coming!

To both Wizadora and Johnny English:

My comment is not about the ultimate price of the application. €200,- is very cheap for a fully functional, reliable ecommerce solution. It's just that you don't seem to have the option to try before you buy, and while I've looked at, tried, set up and implemented a whole range of these things ( as I'm sure JE has also done) which makes it possible to look into the backend and get an overall picture of the functionality, I'd still like to try a product before I implement it. I once "invested" into an application which seemed to offer everything I needed but I realised very quickly that in fact it fulfilled every requirement except one essential thing, which made it useless to me. My own fault, of course but I'd not have made that error if I'd been able to spend 15 minutes testing it under my real conditions. It had been inconceivable to me that somebody would build an such an application without that function, but I was wrong and I had neither the time nor the will to cobble together my own solution.

The bit about getting the fingernails dirty, I'd have agreed completely a year or two ago, but there are now so many instant install possibilities for open source applications that this aspect is minimised. For a new starter I don't really see that accessing the backend of an application like OSCommerce, which has been installed and is running on your hosting provider's server, is any different to accessing a similar but paid-for product on another server. Surely the learning curve is similar in both cases?

Hope you find what you're looking for.

If you visit www.myhammer.de you will be able to get someone to do it for you for about 200 euros. Setting up an ecommerce shop is quite easy work for some people! (Although I wouldn´t have a clue!).

Is yahoo not a viable option here? They offer simple and decent looking site possibilities for around 30$ a month. Anyone have any experiences with the yahoo offering?

OSCommerce is a good option. The advantage with respect to some other similarly capable options is that you have a thriving developer community who can help you out when you need additional stuff. You can also buy pre-designed templates that can be modified for an additional cost. If you want to go a little bit farther you can get CRELoaded, which is OSCommerce with a lot of the extensions already bundled in. It even has a digital download delivery module as well as payment modules with facilities for different currencies and languages. The latest version is paid, but if you buy one of the templates they'll install the previous free version for you.

I think that template+installation+basic mods can be done for less than 300EUR ($450?)

Look at: http://www.websitetemplates.com/ (also offers templates for Zen Cart and some other packages)
and
www.creloaded.com

In my opinion, OScommerce is old-fashioned and has had its days. New kid on the block Magento just has lots more to offer and seems to have taken the lead in open source eCommerce software, I'm actually a bit surprised not to see this name popping up in the discussion above!

Magento offer a Multi-site option, allowing you to run different shops in different languages with different themes, catalogs and payments options all managed through one back-end. Magento's community edition is freely available, as are dozens of professional templates to get you started quickly. Check out a few stores in this Magento showcase.

Let me know if you need more information!