Easy E-Commerce

Last year's holiday season saw a tremendous upswing in online shopping. Sure, most of it was on big sites like Amazon and those of popular retailers, but there's no reason your store can't get in on the action. We'll show you how you can claim your piece of the e-commerce pie without spending a fortune or being a programming whiz.

The one-stop services we review here will let you easily build and host an online store where customers can buy your products and interact with you directly. They'll feed you new leads and increase return visits. For those who just want to build a site and don't need to sell, we look at services like Tripod and Geocities in the sidebar "Just for Fun: Personal Site Builders."

Once it was enough to post what amounted to an online Yellow Pages ad. But today's tools make it easy for you to design a site, upload your catalog, and start taking orders. For just an afternoon or two of your time and $50 a month in hosting fees, you can open the doors to your virtual store.

In the past, you'd have to find a hosting provider, build your pages with software like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia's Dreamweaver mx, and then tie into an e-commerce engine like Miva or osCommerce. Now, hosting services with integrated site building and e-commerce let you do it all in one place.

To give you the lowdown on e-commerce hosting solutions suitable for a small business, we evaluated seven services priced at a maximum of $50 a month. You can spend even less, but that often means sacrificing features crucial to many e-commerce operations, such as automatic calculation of tax and shipping charges or the ability to accept credit cards. Of course, you can spend much more—and you may have to if you have a large catalog, need large amounts of disk space or bandwidth, or want more advanced marketing features.

Building your own e-commerce site isn't the only way to sell products over the Web; listing on an auction site like eBay or in an existing marketplace like Yahoo! Stores is a popular alternative, and it can offer the advantage of positioning you squarely in front of a large audience. The hosting solutions give you more control over your presence, though, and some services we tested offer the best of both worlds by linking products on your site to your auction listings and providing search engine placement and e-mail marketing managers. Other advanced features include integration with your existing accounting systems, such as QuickBooks.

For help in planning your site strategy, see the sidebar "12 Tips for a Successful Web Store." If it's time to launch—or simply reinvigorate—your small business's e-commerce efforts, our reviews in the following pages will show you which hosting services deliver the goods.