Are you ready to setup a website and wondering what’s the best hosted shopping cart out there?
I have mentioned before that while Etsy’s platform provides free exposure, an Etsy seller needs a backup plan. Sellers also can’t make their shop truly unique because Etsy shop design tools are limited. At the end of the day, sellers are still promoting Etsy’s platform, not their own brand.
So if you are wondering what’s the best website builder that Etsy sellers can recommend, keep on reading!
1. Shopify
Shopify has some of the more expensive plans compared to the other website builders on this list, but the tools offered help support the business-focused seller. Sellers can choose from hundreds of free and paid themes for their website and import their Etsy products with a CSV file.
From Carly of stitchntyme:
“I have been using Shopify for a little over a year. Very happy with them. Their communication is awesome, their SEO is super and they are always looking for ways to make marketing easier.”
2. Create.Net
Create.net allows sellers to easily create your own website and online shop. So whatever your business, you can get on with running your website with minimal fuss and maximum results.
From Gina of WallCakes:
“I had read about this one create.net in the forums here the other day. I tried it out and was very impressed. The pricing is good and there’s a lot of templates to choose from. The customer service is awesome too. I’ve been working on a website using a WordPress template, and have decided to stay with that, but would definitely use Create if I wasn’t already set up with WordPress.”
3. Big Commerce
Big Commerce is a highly customizable platform that allows you to create the nice shopping experience. You can also make code-free updates or work with a developer to customize any aspect of your website’s design.
From KnockoutVintage:
“Big commerce all the way. You can customize the image dimensions on there too.”
4. Big Cartel
Big Cartel is an ecommerce website builder dedicated to artists and crafters. The paid plans are affordable and this website builder has 10 templates to get an online store set up in a jiffy. The downside is that sellers can only list up to 300 items with the most expensive plan. So if they want to list more products, they will need to go with another website builder. Find out more here.
From Grete of thegretest:
“Big Cartel is a great option. It’s very easy to handle and the first 5 products are free. I totally recommend it specially if you don’t have any experience with html. My shop is there and I’m happy with them.”
Shopping Cart Trial
According to Colorada who started a thread on Etsy forums, she needs to be able to put in 100 or so dresses and survive!!! Chief needs are security, ability to customize design, easy to add items/pictures, multiple payment integrations.
So she tried the popular ones and here is her feedback:
“I tried MagentoGo and just couldn’t make it work. I”m either too not technical or the directions were obscure…but I couldn’t change the template to add my pics or adjust it. I gave up.
I was given a link to a designer who does OpenCart designs. I like OpenCart ‘s look and seriously considered it sometime back, but the forums are all but useless for getting information and I’d hate to have to ask for help for every little thing. Also, I found some serious security issues discussed and it would be hard to be sure they had been addressed well by the designer. It would also be over my head on my own.
I decided I don’t want to have to deal with updates and security issues with self-hosting, even a WP.org blog. I’d rather make things….something I’ve not been able to do too much since this search started.
I narrowed it down to Webs.com, Jimdo.com, Weebly.com and Create.net., all of which are hosted shops…updated and maintained by them.
Webs.com seemed like the most feature rich of them all, but at $20 mo, it was as high and not as good as Big Commerce. My shop brings in only occasional sales and I’m at 2 paid venues now…just got done trying BigCartel and went back to free shop for now. I don’t have enough of an income to warrant that price right now.Webs.com has an etsy downloader, a feature none of the others have. I came back to only two payment processor options, PP & GCO and I was looking for more.
Big Cartel was easy to set up shop and quick listing, but customizing the look was painful and required a template basically. I didn’t get much in the way of hits, despite being linked to a very busy blog at WP. It does, however, get you into Google organic search well. Still views were a trickle. Def would have to advertise to get traffic. Did find some nice templates, but gave up and downgraded today.
JImdo looks good and can be customised…lots of features. At the end it came down to only offering Paypal. I need more, since i”m trying to get away from depending solely on PP for my biz.
Weebly.com I’ve tried before and found the site builder tiring and clunky to work with. It was hard to upload and postion photos and set things up the way I want. I was willing to try it again with custom html/css. It has better seo control seemingly than others, the price is great, takes only PP & GC though. I decided that the fact that shipping is not included would ruin it for me. i could use PP shipping, but that would mess up al my other shops.
Create.net was the one i settled on. The only thing I didn’t like was the small product photos 300×300 max. Otherwise, at about $8 a mo, with lots of features it looked perfect. So I decided to try it free for 30 days. One thing for me was a wide variety of payment processors including Sagepay, Worldpay for international buyers, PP, GCO. I tried it over the last few days, valiantly trying to build a site with their templates. What i wanted was a landing page with a large photo and smaller pics underneath for categories. Then your usual shop pages, blog, info, contact, etc. Long story short, I just couldn’t make it do what I wanted. So I tried the shop pages, trying to upload photos and descriptions. Again, i just couldn’t get it to work for me. Maybe it’s me…but it’s so much less user friendly than etsy/artfire/etc. It took me hours…really to complete a listing.”
So what do you think of these hosted shopping carts? Which one did you pick? Please let us know in the comments.
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