Website

[K.I. Joe]

Hello, I am looking at starting a website and looking at Go Daddy for hosting and website building. It seems to be expensive. Those of you who have websites can you please explain the costs per year to keep it running, who you used, do you sell off your site. It looks like I have to pay one fee for the website and another for the store portion and it also looks like the cost go up substantially after the first year. Any input would be appreciated.

[wnybassman]

I have two websites through Go Daddy and they are each about $100 to $110 a year between the hosting and domain name renewals. I used to sell a fishing product online years ago and I believe I set up a shopping cart type page using PayPal, which worked quite well. Not sure if PayPal still does that or not, that was 10+ years ago.

[GeneralStark]

The big question is what type of site would you like to have? There are many basic free blog type platforms that you can use to set up a basic site with some static pages. If you would like to have the ability to sell products direct from your website with credit card capability, then it gets a bit more complicated and expensive. It also depends on how tech savvy you are and how much time you want to spend managing your site. Cheaper options require more time and effort, but can be effective.

You will have to pay for your domain name and for hosting. If credit card transactions are involved there will likely be a monthly fee + a percentage of each transaction.

I personally like shopify as you can easily set up a store and tweak it for google searches. etc...They also have various apps or plugins that allow you to add purchasing features to a blog site.

[K.I. Joe]

I am looking to have a website that I can sell my maple product, that is easy to update and showcases my farm. The godaddy site looks like it will be at least 30 to 40 a month plus a cost and percentage per sale :o

[tuckermtn]

i use go daddy for a basic website. just rebuilt it a few days ago - pretty simple. do not sell product on there though. might look into square up, as I think they have shopping cart type websites. I use them for my CC transactions.

[Tmeeeh]

We use ipage for domain name registration, hosting the website, and our web store. We use the basic web store that comes with hosting cost. We can only offer 12 different items in our store unless we upgrade to the next level. They also offer options for different website builders that you use yourself. You can upgrade to more complicated stores and website builders with ipage. We have a basic merchant account with Intuit and can take credit card payments on our Intuit account page, swipe cards on our smart phone, or in our Quickbooks accounting software. The basic account has no annual or monthly fee but we pay more per transaction than if we had higher volume sales and upgraded to one of the next level up merchant accounts. Check out the products page on our website. northfamilyfarm.com When you click on the Add to Cart button it takes you to our store pages that are separate from our regular website. It takes a while to set up all this. If you do it yourself you'll save a bunch. Then again your website will have the homemade look like ours. We keep getting offers by website designers to make our site look more stylish. But it works. It takes a while to build sales online. Over the last 5 years our online sales have grown to around $4,000 per year are still a relatively small percentage of our total maple sales.

[unc23win]

Tim do you take credit card sales in person? For me I think that is the deciding factor I would like to be able to accept credit card sales online and in person. I like that ipage is a website with online store all in one and the rates seems to be good, but I would like to be able to take credit card sales both online and in person. So it depends on what your looking for I guess.

To me looking over all the options shared (thanks all) it looks like square up (with shopify a close 2nd) is very good option for doing online and in person sales and there is a register app and inventory and you can also get a cash drawer and a bar code scanner all as additional options. Also with square up you can make sales off line when you don't have signal which for mew at my sugarhouse would be great. However I am looking into all before I decide.

[GeneralStark]

Yes, as Tim says it takes time to build an online market. Just because you have a site does not mean people will find it, and in the present environment, VT Maple is a pretty saturated online market. There are quite a few larger producers that have the $ to have someone manage their site 24/7 to keep them on the first or second page of a google search.

But, what I have found is that having a direct sale site makes it easier for people looking for your product to buy it. I sell lots through my farmer's market, and those people often want to buy more, or if someone receives something as a gift and wants more, because my web site is on all my labels they can easily track me down. We also are using Facebook more and more and some of their marketing tools to get our website in front of more people's faces.

I would definitely encourage you to check out Shopify as you can easily set up a basic site and store and for $14 (I think) per month you can host 25 products. They do of course take a 2-3% fee from every transaction but that is ubiquitous. You also can use their CC platform to charge cards through an iphone for no additional charge. It just requires a free app. I have been using this service this year and it is incredibly useful. People will often make a purchase or buy more just because they can use a card.

I would also encourage you to look at other maple producer's sites and figure out what you like and don't like.

[n8hutch]

We Use Square up for the local snowmobile club. The club is very Happy with it, used to have Paypal but there was too many rules.

[Tmeeeh]

Yes we can take cards in person on the smartphone. We can key in the number,take a photo of the card or swipe it. Swiping costs the least per transaction. The app is free. You can enter all your items in the app and tap on the items your customer wants, get the total,swipe the card, the customer signs on the smartphone with their finger and can have a receipt mailed to them. I don't think it works if you don't have cell phone signal where you are. We also use this for selling firewood. We swipe the card before we dump the load in their yard. The our merchant account is separate from our webstore and website. Yes there are many good options out there and more different options coming almost every day it seems. We chose the one we liked best at the time. Once you are signed up you probably won't change to another so do your homework first. As general stark says having a website and facebook account for your business is a very good combination. We haven't added the facebook part yet.

[maple flats]

I use Go Daddy, but they are not easy to get something outside the cookie cutter templates. I do not sell directly on the website. I have a submission form that gets emailed to me. Then I generate a PayPal invoice. They are then offered the option of using a card via PayPal, using their PayPal account, or sending me a check. I think PayPal charges me $.15/transaction, + 2.75% of the total amount of the transaction. While I got a PayPal card reader to use with my smart phone, I have not had anyone charge in person, the pay either cash or check.
If you want a simple website Go Daddy is OK but if you want to get fancy or to set up a shopping cart you should look around more before choosing any particular one.
I asked a website designer for a price to make my site more eye catching and a little fancier. He said he will not work under the limitations that Go Daddy has.

[K.I. Joe]

Any tips on what I should be looking for when research a host

[Sugarmaker]

P.M. sent to you.
Regards,
Chris

[sugaringman85]

We recently set up our own website. We used Small Farm Central. Its $45 a month, which includes a mailing list and a couple of other things. It worked good for us because we are not just sugaring, we have a bunch of other things we do...firewood, timber harvesting, tree care, grass fed beef, and horse hay to say a few!