BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
Shopcreator.com and others cost upwards of £800, with monthly running fees, mysimpleshop.com doesnt cost a penny. Naturally, its nowwhere near as powerful as the proprietary off-the-shelf e-shop programs but, hey, its free!
A bike shop with 1000s of SKUs will soon want to progress to a professionally designed e-commerce option or use the £800 modular systems with more expandability but the javascripted mysimpleshop.com is a useful starting point for those wishing to experiment with configuring more complex programs but who dont want to commit just yet.
mysimpleshop.com comes in a 70kb download and works on any server, even free space.
Demos of two shops are online at the main URL and there are also three real shops. The candles shop looks pretty professional.
Creating a shop is dead easy. You use the cut and paste options andbundled images before moving on to your own configurable shop. Its a case of adding and deleting from a list of options, no design or web experience is necessary.
Whats the catch? The designers of mysimpleshop charge a tenner if you want the more comprehensive help files (not necessary) and the secure ordering bit of your website has to be handled by SECpay.com, which charges a a £50 joining fee with a £10 a month service charge. SECpay also takes 1.9 percent cut of your revenue.
