A hosted ecommerce solution

Working with many small to medium business owners as well as startup entrepreneurs we find that initial capital investment put into developing a new site can be rather intimidating. Even free opensource softwares such as Magento or Prestashop, Zencart, etc… requires a considerable amount of work put into it before it can be put into full use. Along with that, the extra work has to be put into researching (and understanding) hosting service, SSL certficates, regular backups as well as other stuffs lead to a steep learning curve which is rather unnecessary for business owners who have limited amount of time (and sometimes capital).

There are hosted solutions out there  of course such as the wonderful shopify.com with its nice and simple cart for startups. However, many hosted solutions have certain disadvantages:

1. Most are closed-source, so you can not buyout your whole site at some point when you may have outgrown the service provider and want to fully customize and develop your cart on your own. Instead, you may have to struggle to develop a completely new site and find a way to import all your current data to the new one.
2. Many lack certain important features such as multilanguage feature on shopify.com, and there is no easy way to add these features on your own, you have to wait for the service provider to upgrade their own core.
3. Most are developed for general purpose, which mean if you are in a niche business it’s rather difficult to have the exact features you need (think about custom clothing stores or auto-part stores)

For all the above reasons, we are looking at creating a new solution that can help business owners who want to enter the online market that:

1. Helps small business owners and startup entrepreneurs to reduce the risks by starting up with the minimum investment (our packages are expected to start from 20usd, which means you can setup a package and start selling right away in with only 20usd, not 2000usd after 2 months)
2. Customized for your business: there will be different packages for the business you are in, and you can certainly use free or homebrew add-ons on the market. You will also have the option to buyout the whole store to grab the whole database and code and use it on your own.
3. Developed for the mass: every technical setups and configurations should and will be done under the hood, the extra time that you would have to put into learning the technical stuffs will now be put again into your hand to do marketing researchs, networking with customers and susch,… Things that can help you grow your sales
4. Fast and reliable: hosted on the clouds, developed with latest technologies under the hood, automatically back-up regularly, you will no longer have to worry about losing customers because of the site slow responsiveness, or loss of data because you forget to do backups.
   

We would love to know if you are interested in such a solution, and if you are, please take your time to fill in a short survey for this new project, we love to hear from you