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10 Steps to Magento Ecommerce on a (small) Budget

This post basically regurgitates greatly expands on an email I sent to a good friend of mine this week when he asked me about building an ecommerce webstore, and whether the quote he had of $25,000 was reasonable for an owner-operator hand-painted pottery website. Hint: it’s not.

Naturally enough I didn’t think that was reasonable, and I listed a few simple steps that can be taken to get a free Magento webstore up and running for a small budget – at least an order of magnitude less than the agency quote. The catch is, it takes a bit of elbow grease and tech savvy – it doesn’t require you to actually program computers though.

I’ll state upfront, I’m the kind of person who would rather have a store that only does half of the things you want it to, running; than one that is still in development with load of great features ‘coming soon’. I subscribe to the actually shipping is the best feature philosophy of software development (that’s also my excuse for releasing buggy beta software).

So, with the 10 steps below, you can join the dot.com boom and get selling your products online through Magento. I’ll run through the steps below, and try to keep a running tally of costs as we go. If you spot anything you disagree with, please comment, I’d like this to be as accurate as possible. Preamble over, let’s get down to it.

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