Using a blog as your e-commerce website?

[kislany]

[wade_watson]

I love the simplicity of starting and updating in Blogger, but I keep hearing about-- and experiencing-- the pitfalls. Apparently Blogger can eliminate your blog on a moment's notice notice for various reasons. I recently experienced a programming flaw that puts someone else's title graphic in place of mine. Since it's free, it makes sense to keep a Blogger page going for promotion, but I wouldn't depend upon it too much.

I think selling products in a blog is a very good idea, though. You might consider using WordPress or another blog manager in you own domain do do the same thing. Supposedly, the search engines like blogs a lot because of the frequency of updates.

--Wade

[KristenArnold]

I have to admit, I just talked to someone this week and Wordpress.com shut down 3 of her blogs with no warning.

Personally, I love the simplicity of blogs and I think it would have saved me hundreds of dollars if I had started with a blog as an ecommerce solution when I first started instead of paying web designers and installing shopping carts and yadda yadda.

I have since learned how to create html pages with a free editor and upload/redirect when needed and I am thinking about transforming my ecommerce site into a blog and using standard html pages when needed.

For the price of a domain- 10 bucks and a hosting plan at under 10 dollars a month I think the return value is worth it. They even have ecommerce ready wordpress themes available like here http://ithemes.com/purchase/ecommerce-theme-1/ that for a small investment you have it ready to go (btw that's not an affiliate link lol) then using paypal if you only have a couple items or ejunkie allows you to sell physical products for $5.00 a month if you start offering more.

There is also an ecommerce plugin that's free that you can use with any free or paid blog theme.

Hope that helps
Kristen

[wade_watson]

Good thoughts, Kristen. Just to clearify any possible newbie confusion, WordPress.com is different from WordPress the site manager/template. WordPress.com is a free service that operates like Blogger that puts you on it's domain. WordPress the site template is a file you can download for free, then upload to your server to run at your own domain.

--Wade

[kislany]

Thanks for your replies on this. I've decided to go with osCommerce on Hostgator. I'm in early stages, so it will take me a good while, but I'm learning as I go along

[mellymom3]

osCommerce is a good choice. Host Gator is a good hosting service. I do like your blog though from blogger, so definitely keep that going as a way to point people to your shop on your own domain. I love building stores. I have built a few with the wordpress plugin on my own domains blogs, I have set up a bunch on free sites such as 1freecart.com, vstore.ca, freewebs.com, and weebly.com, and I have also built stores with Cube Cart, Zencart, Magento, and OsCommerce with my own domain/hosting accounts.

I think of everything I have learned and tried, creating stores is one of my favorites. I have used the services of ejunkie but found that all in all it was too expensive for the amount of products I wanted when I could create my own stores on my own hosting and do it all for $10.

I wish you luck with your business. Your jewellery is very nice and if I wore jewellery on a regular basis I would like to wear some of your pieces. I think I may spread the word though and tell my relatives who do wear jewellery that you have some nice pieces.

keep up the good work!

[kislany]