Question

You would like to setup a website to sell towels, linens, pottery, and tableware from Portugal and are examining services for hosting small business internet storefronts. Your website should be able to take secure credit card payments and calculate shipping costs and taxes. Initially, you would like to display photos and descriptions of 40 products. Visit Yahoo! Small Business, GoDaddy, and iPage and compare the range of e-commerce hosting services they offer to small businesses, their capabilities and their costs.

Examine the tools they provide for creating an e-commerce site.

Compare these services and decide which you would use if you were actually establishing a web store.

Write a brief report indicating your choice and explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each service.

Yahoo Professional	GoDaddy	iPage
-       Unlimited product listings	-       Add up to 1500 products, with up to 10 images per product	-       SEO interest
-       Unlimited storage space and bandwidth	-       Securely accept all major credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay with both Square and Stripe for back-end payment processing	-       Works with PayPal services built in.
-       1% transaction fee	-       Chose multiple shipping methods. Plus, send automated reminder emails when customers leave products in cart.	-       SSL certificates
-       30 email accounts	-       Give clients access to your calendar with Online Appointments.	-       Doba Product Sourcing Simplified
-       Free Domain	-       Built for a smartphone world	-       Standard shared hosting
-       Mobile-optimized storefront	-       Mobile checkout helps boost sales by reducing extra taps and swipes for customers.	WordPress hosting
-       Built-in SEO	-       Mobile-friendly	-       One dedicated IP address
-       Live Insights activity monitoring	-       Smartphone and Laptop compatibility.	-       24/7 phone, chat, and email support on all plans
-       PayPal Support	-       Manage orders from your mobile phone. Get text alerts for new orders or appointments	-       Enhanced security suite included. UPS power backup, plus a backup generator.
-       Chat Live with customers on your store (web and mobile)	-       GoCentral website builder helps improve your rank on Google, Yahoo, and bing by automatically adding relevant, high-value keywords and phrases.	-       VPS Business
-       Bulk product import and export	-       Automatically creates a Facebook page.	-       Disk space 90GB
-       24/7 phone, chat, and online support	-       Free hosting	-       Bandwidth 3TB
-       API access for 3rd party solutions	-       Unlimited bandwidth	-       RAM 4GB
	-       Pricing after free month is 29.99 monthly	-       Processor 2-Core CPU
		-       Dedicated IPs 2
		-       Price 47.99 Month

Answer 1

1. Tools that each of them provide for creation of e commerce site

• For yahoo:

Yahoo through yahoo merchants’ solutions and yahoo store offers everything that is required to build, host, expand, manage and promote the online store. The maintenance and management of store can be done with the help of non programmers in the yahoo merchant solutions online tools like store manager, store editor and catalog manager. These facilities will also help in building back office applications like CGI scripts and XML to the stores.

• For Go Daddy

The go daddy website helps in designing the new online store which matches our industry and interests. It can create an online store that can add up to 1,500 products and also help in managing the inventory.

The website is designed in such a manner that it encourages online payments through debit and credit cards and also money being automatically transferred to the account after sales.

It also has an abandoned cart recovery feature which sends intimation to the customers to complete the purchase.

• I page: some of the commerce tools of ipage are:

1. Shop site application: this helps in promoting and processing the orders online and also helps in integrating payments through PayPal, Google etc.
2. SSL Certificate: this is offered for a more secure website. This is useful when a small amount is paid, the payments and the personal data of the customers can be safe.
3. Doba: this is easy management of product control and inventory. It also helps in accessing more number of products through wide range of suppliers.

                      The service that I would like to use would be go daddy. This is because it has many features and advantages for the business people to establish online store. The cost is also considered to be economical when compared to other two options. It also has other benefits like mobile phone access, shipping benefits, free hosting etc.

              Strengths and weaknesses of each service:

1. Yahoo:

Strengths:

• Unlimited product listings and storage space and bandwidth.
• Free domain
• Live insights activity monitoring.
• PayPal support.
• Live chat with the customers and 24/7 online support.
• Bulk import and export of products.

Weakness:

• 1% transaction fee.
• No of email accounts restricted to 30.

1. Go daddy:

Strengths:

• Online payment through credit cards, PayPal etc.
• Mobile friendly and smart phone and laptop compatibility.
• Free hosting
• Unlimited bandwidth.
• Enables the clients to access our calendar with appointments through online.

                          Weakness:

• There is a monthly charge of 29.99.

Actually, there are no points for weakness under go daddy.

1. Ipage:

Strengths:

• Product sourcing simplified.
• Standard shared hosting.
• 24/7 online chat and support on all plans.
• Enhanced security suite.
• Works with PayPal for online services.

                         Weakness:

• Monthly charge is 47.99 which is considered to be expensive when compared to go daddy.
• It has limited bandwidth, disk space and RAM.