Ecommerce Today,

After black Friday comes Cyber Monday.  But all those Cyber Monday sales seem to be lasting all week or even longer.

I have found good results with posting to ebay this time of year.  Items that normally do not get any bid until the last few hours have been getting high bids early on and Buy it now is equally sucsessful.

I have also addes selling with Amazon on a few items, but Amazon’s restrictions on what I can charge for shipping is hurting.  I recently sold an item that Amazon would only pay 5 dollarsfor shipping but the shipping easliy cost me over $9.00.  Getting customers to buy from my own store is the most profitable for me, but you can’t deny the coverage you get from listing items on ebay and Amazon.

As I outlined in my last Magento Commerce post , I have started down the path of using Magento as my Shopping cart on one of my sites.  Magento is not for Joe Schmoe who just wants to sell stuff fast.  To get Magento to work and look properly you must know HTML and XML. Even better if you know php, css, and java script.  Since I am not expert in these areas, but know a little I have come up with a plan.

I will edit and generate HTML that I need using the free WYSIWYG editor Komposer .  I feel that I can get the site looking respectable and functional by my self.  Once the site is working and back to generating a little money I will hire a professional web design company to redo the design for a more customized look and feel.

Magento is great free software full of features that you can’t find on other open source platforms. Magento is not a quick and easy store that you can put up in an hour or two.  It is going to take days or even weeks of programming to get it right, but after that it seems like it is easy to maintain.

There is more to come about my adventures with Magento.