The easy way to get an e-commerce site online

It’s no secret that when small businesses and the internet collide, the results often look as though a lorry full of animated GIFs has shed it’s load across all six lanes of the M25 with disastrous consequences. Typically, small businesses are unable to afford the costs associated with building professional e-commerce systems and lack the necessary resources to develop worthwhile sites themselves.

Get Trolleyed is a hosted application that lets anybody build professional-looking, fully functioning commerce sites without needing any programming or site building expertise. The service costs £300 for the first year and £150 each subsequent year. This tidy sum gets you a .co.uk domain name of your choosing, 50Mb of server space, a merchant account that lets you accept credit card orders and, of course, access to the site building tools.

Don’t worry if even simple HTML gives you the heebie-jeebies, because Get Trolleyed has a range of site templates that can be customised to varying degrees, depending on how dirty you want to get your hands. Clearly the most difficult part of building an online store is the product database and ordering system, but this is Get Trolleyed’s trump card. The processes of building an online catalogue on the site is menu-driven, and can be accomplished with absolutely no database programming know-how.

Get Trolleyed uses a flexible system that allows for multiple variations of any given product - items of clothing can be displayed in a range of colours and sizes, for example. All you need do is supply images of your products and tell the system what the available options are.

It’s fair to say that Get Trolleyed is not idiot proof - if you have no computer skills whatsoever it’s unlikely you’ll be able to get a store up and running without a bit of help. However, most reasonably competent computer users will find the system straightforward to set up and those who go on to develop even basic site building skills will be able to customise their sites.

Get Trolleyed is no substitute for employing a specialist Web development agency to custom build a solution for your business. However, at a tiny fraction of the cost, it’s one of the best ways for small businesses to get online.

Lance Concannon