Someone on sitepoint recently asked for some advice on the costs of building a online store and if it was possible with $5k.

First off, building a website and thinking a your most of the way there is crazy.. like building a shop in the middle of the Sahara desert… it can be the best shop in the world but no one will find it. ecommerce is about marketing first and foremost… not the traditional marketing but pay-per-click and seo etc. (this may be obvious but i think it needs to be said.)
50% of time and money should be allocated to marketing at least.

Also, while dropshipping is a great option really you should buy stock if you have any confidence in selling your products.

Some possible steps to consider when building a online store with jshop for example (substitute oscommerce if you like)

Hosting & Domain Name Registration

Maintenance.

This doesn’t include,
Accounting, purchasing stock and shipping products and more i haven’t thought of.

Time is a real cost as mentioned earlier.. while you may buy stock, build a website and market it for 5k you won’t do it without sacrificing a large proportion of your time…How much is your time worth?.. value it on an hour basis… lets assume you don’t value yourself very highly and you think your time is worth $20 an hour.

A store like this built right for 5k could take 3 months of your time almost completely. That’s 10k worth of your time. So in reality it cost you 15k. If you pay a consultant and they do half the work for you then isn’t it worth 5k to you? I’d imagine you could do other things in the mean time.

Its all about ROI(Return on Investment) and understanding time really is money no matter how you slice it.

The money & time required to market a store is directly proportionate to the competitiveness of the market. So if your trying to sell ipods then you’ll have to pay a hell of allot to attract attention. The demand then determines your potential revenue.

Naturally there are smarter ways of doing things which give you the advantage. The question you have to ask is do you have an advantage over anyone doing well in the market currently?

I’m always on the look out for a good stats program for my websites. Since most of the sites I’ve developed use PHP I find bbclone a great little stats add on.
Graphical View

Detailed Visitor View

I’ve a few problems with it, like you can’t compare different months but everything else is really nice, its also free. I’m not a fan of any of the Apache log stats tools such as awstats . Besides the fact that they look ugly they aren’t an accurate representation. They count file loads instead of page loads. So even though you load a CSS file when you view a website this represents a ‘hit’, anyhow that’s another days work and there are ways around this.

So, when I heard Google were allowing you to use Urchins web stats tool for free I thought brilliant at last a product that will give me accurate visitor information. So I added the little tracker code to my websites and check back the next day. But unfortunately no stats had been recorded. I’ve had it running now for 2 weeks and it seems to be having loads of problems recording page hits. Hopefully its just a temporary situation but from what I can tell the stats is a few days behind. If this is going to be the case going forward it is pretty disappointing. The nature of computing and the internet is instant data so this is what you’d expected.

I did a comparison of results last week between bbclone and Google analytics and it is definitely missing stats for a few days.

There is no doubting if the software was recording the information accurately and showing the results instantly that it would be a excellent product, but at the moment its just provoking us.

So here’s hoping it gets sorted in the coming weeks as it has some excellent features.

The importance of developing w3c standard compliant websites is becoming more and more popular among everyone in the industry which is great even if it is still rather slow in the uptake.

But with that now comes the need for shopping carts that display valid markup or allow you to manipulate it to display valid xhtml.

I haven’t come across many packages but our recent project http://www.easypsp.co.uk is powered by JShop; a nice ecommerce package. By default the template hasn’t valid markup or even proper css implementation(no tableless design either) but you can manipulate the templates to work with valid xhtml and I’ve been pretty impressed with there setup so far. By popular request the next release is going to have xhtml valid markup.

My question is, what do you use or recommend for w3c standard shopping carts?