I was just going to write to someone what shopping cart software I use, because it's more specific than talking about what kind of website writing skills I can explain or can't explain. More useful to anyone wondering what to do themselves.
Thirtybees.com ecommerce software is...
On web servers' one click installers: Softaculous, Fantastico: not Installatron
These list loads of free software that you can install on your server at the click of a few buttons, if constraints like space allow. Its an alternative to buying an online service like Bigcommerce where the software, software maintenance and hosting are all bundled together and you pay £20 a month or so but it probably works first time. The people who run the service can lock you out of all the detailed features and let you access them for more money, or they can make something impossible for no reason, but they probably provide some sort of help email address and they probably make sure that the thing works as described. This is rather attractive. When you install your own software and something obscure goes wrong, suddenly you are the one who has to find out why.
The main installers are
Softaculous.com/apps/ecommerce/thirty_bees,
Fantastico, and
Installatron - the only one that doesn't list it. A few web hosts have their own cut-down installers which just install one or two programs, like Zacky for Attractsoft sites, and Thirtybees isn't on those. The other chain of free web hosts, Byethost, uses Softaculous so you can install but the program is too large to work on their cut-down-limited bit of server space. If you want to run shopping cart sofware on free hosting, I am not sure the choices but Litecart looks likely to work. It is much more limited in what it can do but might be worth a try. It doesn't allow pages of free text by default, and there is a charge for some of the modules which takes away the "free" bi
Veganline.com was installed from Softaculous and at first there was space to install a backup copy but some kind of bloat has made this trickier now. There were 104 products at the last glance, many of them like vegan shoes available in up to twelve different sizes so there is a potential for bloat. It's also possbile to have a backup of the site from years ago and loose track of it, and to have un-needed versions of photos for eah of your products. If you take revolving pictures - say twelve - of your proruct from two angles then this can be a lot of pictures. One module called database cleaner claims to find unwanted photos and zap them. I am tempted to take the risk.
Small enough to run on cheap hosting, but not free hosting from Attractsoft or Byethost. Also uses free modules
Hosting.co.uk is the shared server I use @ £36 a year or £3 a month if I remember right, without VAT and when I signed-up there was simple pricing over time. It looks as though this has changed and that £3 a month is now an introductory offer with all the hassle of changing servers when the deal runs-out.
A secure server would have cost me more without a messy work-around with Cloudflare that would need a separate page to explain. There is another server that might cost a little bit more and have a secure server ready to use - I would have to check on https://forum.thirtybees.com . The trouble with some of the other cheap ones is that the price goes up after a year and you have to do all the hassle again so I am not sure the cheapest no-hassle price. I know that the cheapest domain price is usually from Cloudflare although I used Penguin-uk. Where were we?
Modules on Thirtybeees are often free. Stripe payments, a basic shopping cart (as you would expect on shopping cart software) are free. So Thirtybees is a cheap option,
Magento, for camparison is one of the biggest most bloated shopping carts but you pay in the need for a bigger faster server. It has tables within tables in its databases which are slow. It is a bit of a pig. The free version is a rare version of an expensive paid service that most people use.
Wordpress with the Woocommerce shopping cart plugin is the most common starting point and might have some wonderful cheap or free module because so many people use it. It is said to be rather slow when uesd for a large number of products. When I tried to use it in the 2010s there were several shopping cart modules available, each charging a lot for basics like a payment processing service, so it didn't seem as free or finished as it first looked. I don't know if that has tot any better.
Not great at integrating your Ebay items with your Amazon items or Etsy: it needs paid modules and there's only one or maybe two
If there is free software that can synchronise sales on Ebay and Amazon and maybe Etsy and more, that's worth knowing. Forget Thirtybees until you have got the hang of the software and please tell me about it, as I think that Ebay Amazon and Etsy are where the money is. If you can have your own site on the web that gets customers too, better still but it will be hard to find.
Thirtybees and most or all shopping carts don't synchronise with Ebay of Amazon by default.
There is about one paid module that is meant to integrate to Ebay but I have not made it work yet, and one for Amazon, and I don't know what else. If you are selling several things a day then there are more choices because you can afford say £15 a month for some hosted service that's meant to integrate everything with everything and have a message board for help, but if you're selling one thing a week you can't afford anything so expensive and there aren't many options.
Not great at running on smartphones without a paid theme or some editing
The free default formatting or "theme" is cluttered on smartphones. Most shopping cart software would have a "responsive theme" that simplifies formatting if the screen is narrower than so-many pixels, and I don't think the Thirtybees default does. I doubt that many of the others do. They were written to be given-away for free with the chance that someone could make quite small amounts of money by selling add-ons, so if they were written before people searched on smartphones, I guess they stay that way. Some time I hope to re-edit by hacks on Veganline.com so there isn't a great beadcumb bar kind of thing that takes up most of the screen on a smartphone.
Number of paid modules: mysterious
Ideally the software shouldn't need paid modules, but if it does, and it's Wordpress, there are hundreds. Thirtybees is based on Prestashop 1.6.1 which had a lot of modules, many still available, and those for Prestashop 1.7 can probably be adapted for a fee but it is all a bit mysterious till you ask and get a yes or a no. Prestashop also tries to sell plugins by one or two dodgy firms that are best avoided or at least paid by credit card so you can maybe get a refund, so the subject of available modules is murkey. Generally the range of Prestashop 1.6 modules still available is reducing, but Thirtybees has made a lot of things free that Prestashop charges for, so you might not need any modules at all. I am still learning about the EU cookie law module and whether I need a paid one
Good at having features that I didn't think of until I had the site started
When checking e-commerce software, it's good to see whether "postage rates" or "payment" are paid extras because these essentials sometimes are.
Making a product out of stock when the last one sells - that's an obvious one but some ways of selling online don't allow it. If you have a remote-hosted cart like Paypal running on free server space like Blogspot then you can't automatically track stock
Space to override the style sheet code is good. If you have something like that in the back office, or somewhere easy, you can replace all your changes each time your site goes wrong and you have to replace it from old notes. I've made loads of changes, mainly to cut out what I don't need, such as the bit of the site that needed every customer to log on and register. Now, with my style sheet changes, none registers and I hope that more of them buy vegan shoes instead.
Stock control with subleties like saying what site a product is on, or giving a warning when the last one or ten are left in stock, can be a big thing. Thirtybees tries to do for free. A previous version of the software called Prestashop tried to do this and then added a warning to shopkeepers not to use those features because they were too buggy and too many people wanted too many differnt things.
Thirtybess is more sensible than Prestashop. It tends either to do something and work, or not do something. You don't see dozens of people on the forum all asking about the same bug, and click on their web sites to see that they have gone out of business maybe because of a Prestashop bug.
Selling something with a variable length - thre's a module for it. It's called "customisation" and most software will let the buyer send a message or even add a size but not much else. I forget why size and variable length are different. Oh: I remember! It is that you have to turn-off the idea of stock if your sizezs are just ways of cutting something, but you have to turn it on again for the next product. I forget the reasoning now and would have to look back at old forum posts.
Adding a page of text about the product or just a blog or explanations - that ought to be part of a shopping cart but sometimes isn't. I don't think Litecart has it.
Importing data from another piece of software as a .csv file is sometimes expensive or tricky. Thirtybees sort of allows it I think.
Good for changing the code
There are three initials for this kind of software - I forget what they are - but they mean that formatting code like CSS and a couple of other types of code are kept distinct. If you want to change the code for a sales page, you can probably see some of the logic to how it works or find someone cheap who can make sense of it for you. There is probably a forum post from years-back by someone who tried something similar. You can cut the bits of a sales page that you don't want, or add bits. You can have different kinds of sales page for different kinds of products and choose them from the back office.
I don't know how good or bad other software is for changing the code; I just know that I have managed it on Thirtybees and it is meant to separate code into categories to make hacking easier.
Not good for Schema.org tags but probably none are and you can try to hack
This is a bit like trying to get your products on ebay and amazon, but for google bing yandex or whoever. They accept product feeds of formatted data to say what you can sell and there is a free feed module for Thirtybees and Prestashop for Google, but better to use tags round the product on the page itself. Search engines can read the page too. They have already done it but Schema.org tags are their preferred way of being directed to data.
Schema.org tags are work in progress. They are not well explained on the Schema.org web site and they often change. A good way to work out what's needed is to find a site like John Lewis that uses them for your kind of product, and feed their most similar web page into https://validator.schema.org/ . This shows you what tags they used. Then you have to try to understand them without sufficient examples on the Schema site itself, and try to tweak your default sales page to include the tags. Quite likely this involves having different kinds of page for different kinds of product. My belt pages still don't work on https://validator.schema.org/ but the shoe pages do. Thirtybees lets you choose a different template sales page for a different kind of product.
Anyway the result is that if you type some unusual search into google that finds one of my pages, google might show the products along the top of the search. I don't know how easy other shopping carts are to hack in the same way and guess that because rather tekkie people like Thirtybees, then it has evolved to help people like them and me.
Conclusion: I don't have much of a clue but Thirtybees looks OK
There are a dozen or more shopping cart programs on sites like Softaculous and I didn't test many of them. For example I am in the UK and a UK-based one is Cubecart. I have done very little to try to compare with Thirtybees. It would take a long time. I just experimented with Magento, Wordpress, Prestashop, then moved to Thirtybees and struck lucky. Someone helped me for free to overcome some problems, maybe caused by bad concentration, and I was hooked. The forum seemed so positive and practical, The odd tekkie bits like whether you can choose to use template 1 or template 2 for belts chosen in the back office all seemed my kind of thing. So: happy but clueless or some better word like not completely accurately clueful in all situations.
