HTML is easy, but creating a professional website is beyond the
average Joe. When it comes to a e-commerce website, the design
is even more complex - logo, navigation, color themes, text
arrangement and content creation. Website creation has been made
easy with web templates. To increase client base, many leading
web hosting companies start offering web hosting templates or
hosting with templates.
Whether you're looking for a simple web site or a functional
e-commerce website, the chances are that you may be able to find
a few web templates from your e-commerce hosting companies. A simple web template may
cost under $20 dollars, but a well-designed professional
e-commerce website will cost a few hundreds or more if not
thousands. The cost of web templates is still cheap comparing to
custom-made e-commerce websites when Web designers charge
anywhere from $20 to $100 per hour.
Besides the requirements of standard web hosting plans, Web hosting with templates for e-commerce operation needs
a shopping cart that supports online catalog and online payment
processing. Web templates for e-commerce often include common
pages and navigations for online shopping - searching or
browsing products, adding items to shopping carts and making
payment. The web templates for e-commerce do not include or
connect to any specific shopping cart. It's up to the webmasters
to add shopping cart (paypal or 2checkout) to the site, which is
often the copy-and-paste of a few lines of HTML code.
The alternative e-commerce hosting to web templates is
e-commerce turnkey solution. EBay Stores, Yahoo! Store and
Microsoft bCentral are the most popular turn-key e-commerce
solutions for small businesses that want to setup online stores
easily. Different hosting plans may have different free
structures. The cost of each hosting plan often varies on
transaction volume.
When comparing functionality, there're many questions to ask: 1)
whether a shopping cart accepts online check or eCheck beside
support on online credit card and paypal for payment options; 2)
whether there's a limit on the number of products and categories
that you can setup; 3) whether it automatically sends out an
email notification once an order is placed successfully. When
looking at the cost of commerce operation, you'll need to ask
questions about 1) what's the basic monthly subscription fee; 2)
whether there's a setup fee for a new online store; 3) whether
you have to pay for the addition of new items to the product
catalog; 4) how much it charges for each transaction. High
volume sites may prefer the plans that charge a higher
monthly-fee but a lower fee on each transaction, while low
volume sites work better with hosting plans that charge zero or
low monthly fee and initial setup fees but a slightly higher fee
on each transaction.
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