Hey, so I need a shopping cart and a payment gateway. Needs to be multilingual and multi-currency, since we're an online language school. I'm thinking of using Brain tree payments and shopify. I saw 1shoppingcart and infusionsoft have gotten some bad reviews. Thoughts?

VICTORY!!!!!

Or a long ways from it, but still it feels good. My latest crappy little website has 22 views for the first 8 days of the month. But those 22 views have made .97 from one advertising source, and another .28 from Amazon.

Yes, it's an incredibly small amount of money, but still a cool feeling to log in and find a little surprise. Also interesting to note, the Amazon purchase was nothing even remotely related to the content on the site. Just a pure luckbox purchase.

Shopping cart really just depends on taste and what you're used to I think.

Magento is popular but sort of bulky and slow.
We currently run our dietary supplement company off ultracart which I think is pretty good for an off the shelf option.

(these are the only two I have direct experience with)

As far as payment gateways why not just start w/ like website payments pro (https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/website-payments-pro). Then as you grow in volume start talking to other processors for lower rates.

I guess this is simpler to implement than authorize.net or braintree, right?

I'd imagine so just being paypal. But you would have to look at the numbers and such to make sure it makes sense for your company. I don't have experience w/ either of those.

I had a bad experience with Authorize.net. Use Paypal Payments Pro.

Please guys any advice what so ever would really help! thanks

i have found a review of these social network platforms and it has said Ning is rated the best, my plan is obviouly making this as big as i can but i have to start really small for this to work and if i have learnt anything from here its start up cheap and fast to see if theres even interest before going nuts with money and spending months waiting to launch, im not thinking about the how to make money from this site yet as im trying to follow the "people dont buy what you do they buy why you do it" philosophy, hoping that solving this problem things would look after them self but out of interested how much traffic, members, does a site need for it to be of value?? im currently playing mid / high stakes online but this project is taking over my life which im loving but wondering how successful a site like this needs to be for me to starting thinking about putting all i have into this, i believe my return hit rate on this site will be decent as i will be having high profile blogs within the community and trying to cause some hot topics of interest!

the blog aspect i must say is very much down to Cardrunners so thanks for the idea Taylor, i remember being clued to that part of your site!

Ning.com looks like a hosted CMS with built in social features. It's probably not the best solution but should be fairly easy.

It looks like they offer a free trial. Just try it to see if you like it.

Personally, I don't think it looks very good.

nope, you can install wordpress locally. if you use xampp the process for installing this is pretty painless http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Just wondering can I get peoples advice on a couple of things. I have decided to start a website up were you can buy books. I went to O desk and a couple of people have got back saying they will do it (my budget is $1000) and they will use

http://demo.magentocommerce.com/

as the e-commerce site. Am I over paying for what looks like a package product or is this what most people do?
Thanks for any help

It depends on what they're actually going to do for you. If they're only planning to install the software and design a theme, you could probably get it done for quite a bit less.

Edit: unless your looking for a very unique or complex theme/design elements.

Congrats!

You will find out people will come through your site and buy all kinds of stuff. My friend does an Ebay site selling HP touchpads and someone came though his site to Ebay and bought a car. He was pretty happy to say the least.

I don't think I am, basically I am looking for a copy of this

http://www.chegg.com/

Out of curiosity how is this relevant?

That site does a couple of pretty cool things.

The first is the school selector. It must use your IP address to find schools that are close to your location.

The second is the search bar.

If they plan to create something similar for a Magento site, as well as design a theme, it's probably worth ~1kish. If not, you should just check into premium Magento themes + invest in a logo.

I have been working with Magento more and more so I have some specific experience in this case. I think you are going to have a hard time getting anywhere close to http://chegg.com on your design for $1k unless you are the driving technical/design mind and just hiring people to do the coding.

Magento is really strong in some ways and weak in others, it has a lot of the functionality you will want to scale a site like this but it has some baffling problems in the year I have been testing it. Basically I wouldnt really recommend Magento unless you have an interest in digging in yourself and learning how Magento works. There is a zencart beta that will also be a strong option and probably better long term once its released as it it a lot faster compared to the non-enterpise version for Magento ($10k/year for enterprise version I think). I would probably recommend a wordpress base to start as I have seen some nice ecommerce setups/themes (CTS recommends WooThemes and I liked what I saw when I looked at it).

Summary:
-Dont want to get technical or raise your $1k budget, go Wordpress or other
-Get technical or bigger budget Magento/Zencart are great options

I don't need the school selector. Just the Search bar is important.

What about if I put another $800 aside for a design on designs99, then get someone to do the required work for $1000 once I have a design. Would this be more realistic or am i still way off?
One other thing, with the payment gateways, is there one that lets you keep people details so you can charge them at a later date if they don't return the book? (this could be a problem)

Is the biggest concern design or functionality? You could get an $800 design done and be very happy with it but the biggest variable is how well you manage outsourced workers and how specific you can get about the details of what you want. Its a difficult skill so if you arent technically savvy, familiar with html/css I think its tough but doable. The way I would do it is:

I want the header to look like http://example-header.com:
-Change the background to a gray-white gradient
-Rounded corners
-Tahoma font
-etc

Thats how I handle outsourcing that kind of situation. If cant do that your budget is way low or you need to get more involved.

If the old site has indexed pages with juice you want to preserve, make sure you don't 301 every page to the new homepage.

went with Ning.com for my social netwrok site, really impressed at how easy it is to use for a complete newb defo reccomend!

looking for place to take photo's from and make logo's, signs, etc. is photoshop the best place for this?

I'm going to save you a lot of time and effort here. If you are short on cash, big on ideas and want to get something looking schmick.

Find someone on 99 designs that you like, look at all their portfolios and find someone who specializes in the kind of look you are wanting. Find someone from a poor european country preferably Serbia or something along these lines.

Send them a message say you would maybe like to work off 99 designs on a project. They will snap call because then they aren't getting juiced the 50% commission on 99 designs. Let them know exactly what you want and tell them you want to do numerous iterations until you like what you get.

These guys are incredibly cheap and can produce good quality work, you just have to keep pushing until you get what you want. I can tell you right now that $800-$1000 will really go along way and you can get a lot of value out of them. Most these guys will work for $8-$10 per hour so you could almost get 100 hours of design work. Even if you got a solid 75 hours you're doing good. You probably only need 4-5 pages done and 20 hours per page is plenty especially if you know what you want.

Make it easy on everyone though. Find exactly what you want for every aspect. Fonts, Headers, Footers, Backgrounds, Layouts. You'll probbaly change your mind unless you have a 100% crystal clear vision of what you want. So try accommodate the designer for anything you feel is going above the call of duty.

It;'s a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. But I had a site built that would have cost me $50,000+ from an Australian firm done by one guy in 3 months for $3,500. So it is possible to get what you want done, but you're goign to have to have som patience. God knows you need it with web people.

Thanks, I think this is the route I will take makes perfect sense. For payment gateways does anyone know one that facilitates for rentals, so if I rent something out to someone and they damage it or lose it I have there details and can charge them at a latter date.

^^^^^ or anyway around it?

Hey guys

I've got a pretty big idea for a website. I've dabbled with photoshop/HTML/PHP etc a few years ago and even built my own site from scratch etc which actually generated revenue.. but that was 6 or 7 years ago and I've forgotten most of the stuff.

Anyway, I know how websites work etc but I cannot be bothered relearning or taking the time to build everything so I'm considering outsourcing all the development.

I've seen oDesk posted in this thread, so I was looking through some of the profiles on there and some coders and content writers etc are only charging $5-10/hr and these are the guys with 5star reviews and they have >10 jobs under their belt. I curious whether these low-paid guys actually produce quality work or not.

Also how does one go about estimating how much time a coder takes to complete a small project (eg writing a small peice of code) etc.

Thanks

Just some example profiles of the ones I'm talking about:

https://www.odesk.com/users/Professi...olio#portfolio

https://www.odesk.com/users/PHP-Mysq...?tot=211&pos=8

https://www.odesk.com/users/Web-Deve...?tot=211&pos=2