Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi guys, wonder if anyone could offer any advice.
We want to setup a website to be the online presence of a bricks & mortar gift shop. However, we (and the person who's shop it is) are complete novices when it comes to this sort of thing. Can anyone offer any advice on what you need to do, what we should use, general ideas about how much it would cost etc? I don't even know what I need to ask for advice about because we literally know nothing about this subject! Any advice or useful links would be very gratefully received.

Are you intending to actually take payment and make transactions on the site; or is it just to showcase the stuff that's available in the physical shop?

Complete whole transactions, which I presume would be managed through paypal? Is that the best way to do it?

http://www.shopify.com/ always seems to be pretty highly recommended whenever I hear about it.

That's a bit vague to give you a cost on, but as long as you don't want anything over-complicated it won't cost too much.

Something like http://www.shopify.co.uk might work well, although it does carry a monthly cost.

o/

\o Though bonus points for you for getting the .co.uk one.

ooooh, clever you, no, clever you, no, you're the cleverest

Would you two just get on with it and rim each other?

We already did. The rims are the circles.

Malabar bit a hole in the pillow.

Not meaning to scare you, but whether you go with PayPal or some other payment processor, remember to get your order acceptance process organised. Online traders are very susceptible to fraud. Just because you receive money from a customer doesn't mean it's theirs to spend and the unwary vendor can get spanked by fraud and chargebacks which leads to your funds being frozen or your account being closed.

Good advice, thanks. We looked at that site mentioned above but ended up trying to build something in... Moon fruit I think it's called?

A friend of mine set up an online store selling vintage style clothes. He's now still doing that, and also has a shop at Affleck's palace, Manchester and a diner. I'll drop him a line, later, although I suspect he'll be rather busy. I'll ask him what software he used for the online shop.