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Since I commonly get asked what services I use for my online store, I thought it would be useful to create a resource page that details every product, tool and service I recommend. If you are thinking about starting an online store in the near future, you should bookmark this page for your reference and convenience. Enjoy!
Web Hosting
Blue Host – Blue Host is the shared host that my wife and I used for 2 years to run our online store before we switched over to dedicated hosting. BlueHost is inexpensive, reliable and offers a wide array of free services. Highly recommended for new shop owners.
ServInt – ServInt is the dedicated webhost that I use now for every website I own including my blog and online store. Service and uptime are top notch and I’ve never had any problems ever. If you are looking for VPS or dedicated hosting, ServInt is awesome.
Domain Registrar and SSL Certs
Go Daddy – While I don’t recommend their hosting service for an online store, GoDaddy offers an excellent and easy to use interface with which to manage your domain names. In addition, they offer a very inexpensive SSL certificate as well. GoDaddy is the service I use for all of my domain management and SSL needs.
Incorporation, DBA, Business Paperwork
LegalZoom – For everything from registering your DBA or filing for an LLC or corporation, LegalZoom is awesome because they get the job done at a fraction of the price. Highly Recommended.
Product Sourcing
Worldwide Brands – An incredible service that helps you locate and contact wholesale vendors for products that you want to sell. The best part is that there’s only one upfront fee that you have to pay and then you can use the service for life. If you don’t like going to tradeshows or cold calling wholesalers, then Worldwide Brands is the way to go because they will save you time.
Global Sources – If you want to import your goods from Asia, then Global Sources is a good place to start. Going through the massive lists of suppliers can be intimidating on this site, but it’s a good place to learn about various trade shows and get in touch with potential vendors.
Canton Fair – This is the trade show that my wife and I try and make every year. It is enormous and a good way to meet vendors face to face if you don’t mind traveling to China.
Shopping Carts
Magento – Magento is one of the most feature rich shopping carts I’ve evaluated and it’s absolutely free. The only downside is that you need a fairly powerful webhost to run it, otherwise your website might get bogged down.
ZenCart – Zen Cart is an easy to use shopping cart that runs extremely fast on shared hosting environments. In addition, most shared hosts like BlueHost offer a 1 click install. Zen Cart has most of the features you need to run a small-medium sized ecommerce business and it’s free!.
OSCMax – Like ZenCart, OSCMax is an easy to use shopping cart that runs extremely fast on shared hosting environments as well. The main advantage of OSCMax is that it is based off of the OSCommerce code base and as a result, you can take advantage of OSCommerce’s huge plugin library. Also like ZenCart and Magento, OSCMax is completely free.
Volusion Ecommerce – If you are not a technical person, don’t want to deal with a webhost or a server, and want to throw up your online store as fast as possible, then Volusion is a great way to go. What’s nice about Volusion is that unlike other hosted ecommerce solutions, they only charge a monthly fee based on the number of products you are selling and nothing else. Volusion also offers 24/7 technical support.
Big Commerce – Like Volusion, BigCommerce also offers a great self hosted shopping cart solution for a fixed monthly fee. Big Commerce has a really nice drag and drop interface so you can design your shopping cart without knowing any HTML whatsoever. While they haven’t been around as long as Volusion and they don’t offer 24 hour support, they are slightly cheaper and provide you with free credit towards Google Adwords.
Shopping Cart Design
Algozone – Most of us aren’t web designers so the best and quickest way to put up an attractive online store is to purchase a template. Algozone offers a large variety of online store designs that you can tailor for your own store. Trust me, it is much easier to start out with an attractive design and then tweak it rather that start completely from scratch. No longer recommended.
Credit Cart Payment Processors
Merchant Plus – An Authorize.net Provider – Back when I was looking for credit card processors, I couldn’t find a better deal than Merchant Plus. They offer very low rates and their support is excellent. Merchant Plus also integrates seamlessly with all of the open source shopping carts that I recommend.
PayPal Website Payments Pro – Since my wife and I use Paypal for many purposes already, we decided on Paypal Website Payments Pro to process credit cards for our online store today. Paypal is nice because it you can ship your packages directly from their interface which saves you from having to use a service like Stamps.com. However, their rates are higher so you have to weigh the pros/cons compared to using a service like Merchant Plus.
Communication, Internet Telephony
Google Voice – It’s free and it’s versatile. Google voice allows you to forward a call from one number to any phone line that you want. My wife and I use Google voice all the time and this service is completely free.
Skype – Skype is great for making international calls. If we have to contact our overseas vendors, we always use Skype because the rates are incredibly low.
Ring Central – Ring Central is an excellent service that is like Google Voice on steroids. With Ring Central, you can get a 1800 number with which you can send/receive calls or faxes at any time. In addition, you can create an auto-receptionist and a custom greeting that lets callers wait for an available employee. And like Google Voice, you can forward a call to any phone line of your choice or make calls from any phone using your office phone number. This service is awesome especially if you are short staffed in your customer support department.
Organizing and Manipulating Photos
Picasa – When you have thousands of product photos to go through, Picasa offers an easy way to breeze through your photo list and make minor edits. Best of all, it’s free.
Adobe Photoshop – I don’t want to say that Photoshop is a must have but it sure does save a ton of time. Sometimes when my wife and I take our photos, they aren’t perfect and we need to make minor edits. For example, if there are wrinkles in our product, we can remove them using Photoshop which saves us a ton of time. Not required but highly highly recommended.
Smug Mug – This service offers an excellent means to backup your product photos online. They store and replicate their photos across multiple datacenters located in different parts of the world so the chances of you losing your photos is extremely low. A must have service to backup your product photos and photos of your family.
Bookkeeping and Finances
Quickbooks – Quickbooks has become the defacto standard for small business bookkeeping. It’s inexpensive and it’s easy to use once you get the hang of it.
Quicken – Quicken allows you to manage your personal finances so you can get a clear picture of your overall financial situation. Wouldn’t be able to save money or build wealth as effectively without it.
Turbo Tax – I’ve already shown that Turbo Tax can perform as well or better than an accountant in my article on the Outcome Of Hiring An Accountant To Do Our Taxes Vs Using Turbo Tax Or Tax Cut. Seriously, TurboTax is awesome even if you run a business and will help you maximize your tax return.
Intuit Online Payroll – Intuit Online Payroll is an excellent payroll service that is priced really well. If you have employees, then it makes sense to outsource the payroll paperwork to someone else. Since Intuit Online Payroll is so inexpensive, it’s a no brainer.
Handling Shipping and Returns – Where To Get A Physical Address
UPS Store – The UPS store is awesome because you can sign up for a mailbox that has a real physical address. If you don’t want to use your own address (if you run your business out of your home) or if you just want to use a separate address, then opening a UPS store mailbox is ideal. Best of all, they will email you whenever you have mail.
USPS PO Box – A PO Box is a poor mans UPS Store mailbox. However, they are also about 10X cheaper than UPS. The disadvantage is that everyone knows that a PO Box is not a real physical address. In addition, PO Boxes can only receive mail from USPS. FedEx and UPS do not deliver to PO Boxes.
Packing Supplies
ULine – ULine is awesome! We get most if not all of our packing supplies from here and they are all reasonably priced.
Unique Packing – Uniquepacking carries some of the harder to find packing supplies. We purchase our cello bags and our anti rip bags from here.
Shipping Carriers
United States Postal Service – Since they are the cheapest shipping carrier and most of our items are lightweight, we use USPS for the majority of our orders. They aren’t the most reliable but are by far the cheapest if your package weighs less than 2 lbs.
FedEx – If the package exceeds 2 lbs, FedEx is our carrier of choice. As soon as you open an account, you get 15% off shipping which makes it cheaper than UPS out of the box. If you ship high volumes, then you can negotiate for better pricing.
DHL – We use DHL for all international shipments because they handle customs and everything for you. All you have to do is sit back, relax and pay the customs bill.
Website Maintenance And Backups
Site Uptime – I use Site Uptime to monitor the downtime for all of our websites. Basically, Site Uptime pings your websites at specified intervals and then sends you an email if your site is down. For all mission critical websites, I highly recommend this service.
Ready NAS – For onsite backups, I use a Ready NAS network storage appliance running RAID 1. This device sits on your network, mirrors your data on 2 drives and sends you an email if one of your drives is about to fail. If a drive is bad, you can simply hot swap it with a new one and the box will make your data redundant again. A must have for backups at home.
Marketing Tools
Google Adwords – Adwords is an incredible tool. Use it to drive very targeted traffic to your online store so you can gain new customers and improve your conversion rate. Even though most of our customers arrive at our website organically today, we still run Adwords to drive traffic because the ROI is excellent.
Aweber – We use Aweber to manage all of our email campaigns. With easy to use templates and awesome email tracking, this service is a must have if you run a newsletter. Read my review here on MailChimp Vs Aweber
ScreenFlow – Screencast videos are videos in which you display slides or whatever is on your computer screen while you narrate in the background. If you want to create screencast videos for your website, then screenflow is an excellent and well priced tool to get the job done.
Staffing And Hiring Help
ODesk – A great place to find virtual assistants and programmers at really attractive rates. We use ODesk to find writers for content writing and article marketing.
Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links to products that will earn me a commission. These are all things that I have experience with that I am recommending because they are helpful and are companies that I trust, not because of the commissions that I may earn from you using these products.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by mywifequit and Roshawn Watson, Deepak Kumar das. Deepak Kumar das said: List of best tools for online purchase http://su.pr/4OxBlD [...]
Great list Steve, it’s good to get into the mind of an online store entrepreneur. I suggest checking out Grasshopper and kall8 for great phone services as well if you need to appear to have a phone tree with several destinations. I haven’t found need of that yet. I still lean toward Mailchimp too, but I know aWeber is really popular. ReadyNAS is heavy duty for a personal computer or two, are you running servers at home? If you wished you could really figure out more on one of these tools what do you think it would be? Great stuff!
@Rob
There so much competition these days that it’s hard to do a thorough review of every service. It’s best to go with what works for you and what you have experience with. I was a ready NAS duo at home rather than a regular PC running RAID because its easier to maintain than a server. Ready NAS also offers boxes with 5 slots so you can run RAID 5. Evaluating more of these tools is not a question of time as opposed to a question of need. Decide the minimum requirements for your business and pay as little as possible.
Steve, nice blog post! I would love to discuss an affiliate partnership with you. I represent Volusion’s affiliate program. Email me to discuss this. We’ll make it really interesting for you (private commission offer).
Hi, I’d like to get into the online store, business advertising, and e-commerce business.
How do I go about doing just that, safely ?
I live in South Africa, and business opportunities here are rare if you do not have thousands in startup capitol.
I am a 3D game designer, and also a free-lance salesman currently busy with a 3D car racing game which I’d like to use for business advertising.
But at this current moment I am employed at a motor vehicle dealership as a parts manager(very demotivated – and depressed doing business for someone else instead of for myself), but has been dreaming of my own thing since childhood. Also had a few small businesses, which offcoarse failed due to unstable partnerships, finances and mistakes made.
Advise please !
[...] Products Steve Loves [...]
Steve Chou,
You have given so very much from your own experiences to others in creating this site. I, for one, have searched on line for many many months for a resource like you offer here. I have downloaded or read perhaps 10 different eBooks and gone through maybe 100 different sites about ‘On Line Marketing’, ‘Affiliate Marketing’, and ‘On Line Stores’ in my endeavour to find answers to some very ellusive questions. Mostly I am just like the many others interested in your site, I crave information which is accurate, complete, and current. What sincerly impressed me the MOST about your site is that you appear to be an HONEST man, from all that I see which you have shown. I commend you for this character trait, which is rapidly vanishing, and for being generous enough to share a great deal of valuable information with people like myself without seeking personal gain.
Thank you,
Dennis Simmons
Hello,
Do you know anything about SiteBuildit.com(SBI)? You would set up your name and create your website through them. They seem to be a bit more expensive but it seems they have great tutorials and help for setting up your site.
Thank you.
The sharing is marvelous! You have revealed the must-have softwares, applications, tools and elements in order to have a successful online business! Would like to know if you purchased the licensed Adobe Photoshop? It is quite expensive, right?
I am trying to find a product or products that I can sale in my business. Stores on line will set up my first store front. I am Looking for someone I can trust. I am about making money. I have clientele, that not the problem. The problem is when
I visit some of the websites, they are asking for money. The problem I have is I going to sale their product in my store. They are talking about membership before I sale the product. I know it is a business and a services at the sometime. I don’t need no fraud in my life. Worldwide brands are excellent. I don’t want put my ideas out until everyone see my store front. My license #3971550 on Stores on line.
Thank you for your help
Hi Steve,
I followed your advice and purchased a template from Algozone. I have to admit that their templates are very nice and professionally designed. However, there are 2 problems with them:
1. It is very expensive. A decent template would cost somewhere $150 – $300. Not a biggie for those who want to really invest into their business. However…
2. Their customer/technical support service is very horrible. The template I bought is around $200 and I was expecting some sort of excellent support. After I found out a tons of bugs with the purchased template, I contacted them for help but was either being ignored or they replied to me with some B.S. (most of the time less than 2 short sentences) and closed the support ticket right away without me indicating that the issue was resolved. So I ended up fixing all of the bugs myself, which is such a nightmare because their template is nothing like the original zen cart template (they use a lot of their own scripts and functions that could not be easily located). Nobody on the zen cart community forum was able to help me as well. Some of the bugs are very critical such as the website only display html codes but not regular text. Other bug had to do with checkout and credit card information. These will drive your customers away in the first instant, especially if your store is newly created.
Just to let you and others know so you would think twice about buying their products. I bought some other ugly templates from different website and don’t experience such thing.
Hi Vincent,
Your comment is well timed. I’m in the midst of writing an article about why I no longer recommend Algozone for the blog. Now I’ve used and recommended many people to Algozone in the past and things have gone well. However, I had a recent run in with them which I’ll describe in more detail in my post. Thanks for sharing your experience with me.
Hi first off I want to say thank you for the wealth of info you provide on your site! Its awesome! I had a question, Since the dollar is weak do you still import from China? Or would it be cheaper for you to buy domestic with your fabrics or other products? Thank you!
Regards,
Chris L.
Hey Chris
Let’s just say that the dollar has to get substantially weaker for it not to be worth it to import from overseas. Prices are rising however.
This is a brilliant list Steve. I owned an online store a few years ago and used some of the these services. I still use PMI for mail forwarding and incorporated with Bizfilings.
Good resources here thanks.