Public cloud providers
Classroom project webshop software
Preselected candidate solutions for building for free your own webshop
- You may propose something else
- You have to decide yourself which one you will use.
- It's not a matter of picking "the best one". It will be rather important to judge the stengths and weaknesses.
Classroom project candidate webshops
The e-webshop’s proposed here are candidates you can use for your class-project.
They have NOT been selected because they are the greatest e-commerce applications. If going for a real project later on, you will have to use other criteria then the ones we used here – which are pure practical considerations to let it work at no cost and without ICT team support in a class context.
- A ‘free’ version should be available. Free is actually never free...in case you would want to use this later on professionally
- Public cloud flavor: we don’t want to bother with server infrastructure, hosting e-commerce software, managing webservers – so only a ready for use solution is an option – a one stop solution.
- No ICT skills required. It should not be necessary to have HTML / CSS knowledge to build the e-webshop
www.jimdo.com
+ very easy to use
+ excellent online store
+ wide choice of designs
+ comes with a domain name and email address
www.weebly.com
+ flexible
+ good blog feature
+ pricing
+ assign different access levels for editors
www.webs.com
+ great number of features
+ modern designs
+ very flexible
- cluttered backend
www.yola.com
+ easy to use
+ great support
+ excellent e-commerce
- Yola ad in Bronze plan
www.webnode.com
+ suited for larger (multilingual) websites
+ range of professional features
+ great for SEO
- designs
www.wix.com
+ impressive-looking designs
+ add animation and multimedia
+ HTML5 based in the latest version, so tablet/smartphone ready
- relatively pricy
www.shoply.com
-Not a general purpose website builder, but dedicated webshop
+Integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest
+Seller dashboard
+Marketing tools
https://biedmeerwebwinkels.nl/
+Multilingual support
+backend integration
+marketing tools
+ - Focus on Dutch speaking market
https://www.payvment.com/
+ e-commerce on FaceBook
+ analytics
Scoring a provider
Scoring a provider is about scoring the product, its price, and the service you can get.
The product
Technology
- Underlying technology (Open source, proprietary, market share)
- Database driven ?
- Supports dynamic product/page creation ?
- Template driven
- Integration capabilities (API’s, XML, custom, of the shelve components)
Internet marketing
- Level of SEO en SEA support
- Social media integration
- Linking your own domain, linking into your existing website ?
- Affiliate tracking (e.g. traffic coming from publicity on affiliate website to your webshop)
- Coupon codes
- E-mail marketing integration
- Product reviews
International
- Multi currency ?
- Multiple payment processors – also the local ones !
- Multi language (easy of running your webshop in multiple languages)
Back-end integration & modules
- Role based backoffice
- Order management & editing
- Inventory tracking
- Accounting
- Transportation
- Shipping integration
Functionality
- Flexibility
- User registration
- Automated user interaction & follow up
- Returns
- Product options
Reporting capabilities
- Sales reporting
- Web Analytics
The price
- Monthly fee ? (many have a free version, with more feature rich paid versions)
- Transaction fee ? (some will charge a fee on each transaction
- Data fee ? (some will charge if the amount of traffic to your website exceed data volume thresholds)
- Support contract ?
- Consultancy rate ?
- Change management rate ?
The service
More important then functionality !
The Service:
SLA (service level agreement) = contractual clause between the service provider and service recipient about the quality of the service
Contains formulations on response time in case of incidents & problems, downtime, backup quality, etc...
Examples:
- <= 4 hours downtime / month
- 4 hours response time for a priority 1 incident, 24x7
- 8 hours response time for a priority 2 incident, 8x5
- Max data loss <24 hours
- Change request lead time: 3 working days
- Escalation channels
Service capabilities
- Technical service desk ?
- Training & consultancy ?
- Project support ?
- Ongoing support & maintenance ?
- Local presence ?