In today's world you can find anything and everything online, from the news and weather to shopping and gaming and everything in between. If you want to keep up in an online world then you need to be online yourself; this can include anything from blogging, to social networking, to having your own business website. Those first two are made easy with things like Blogger and Facebook but if you want to have your own online business your best bet starting out is to find good free ecommerce hosting to help you set up your website and to host it for you. The problem is that with the dot-com bust of the late nineties there were many companies offering ‘free' services to try to jump on the bandwagon only to turn around and charge you hidden fees, have poor customer service, or low up time of the website.
First I want to talk about what to avoid when trying to find free ecommerce hosting. Remember the old saying, "If it's too good to be true, then it probably is"; well that applies to free ecommerce hosting as well. If it seems like you are getting way too much for free or the services seem perfect but you haven't talked to a real live person yet then I'd steer clear of them. It's really easy to put a promise on a web page, take someone's money and then never follow through. A bigger problem is that you generally have to sign a EULA, End User License Agreement, which basically waves most of your rights to press legal action. Common downfalls of free ecommerce hosting can be large amounts of downtime on the servers meaning your website is only working a small amount of the time; limited to no features such as credit card authorization or page customization; or charging you fees at a later date due to some fine print writing. These are all things to be aware of when trying to find free ecommerce hosting as there have been a lot of sites in the past that would use these practices; but fear not as there is hope.
Once you have hosting planned, you will need to decide on a reliable ecommerce solution to build your site in.
Over the years natural selection so to speak as weeded out some of the unreliable companies and while a few pop up from time to time you as the consumer need to know that you don't have to sacrifice quality for free ecommerce hosting. A common misconception is that in order to get good free ecommerce hosting you have to pay a firm a large set-up fee and an arm and a leg a month to host the site for you, but that simply isn't true anymore. Free ecommerce hosting with good features, great up time and customer service may be a little hard to find from all the different companies, but it is definitely not unreachable.
All you have to do is find a company that looks like it will fit your needs and then follow up with a few calls and try to get references and reviews. If you call them and get sent to a call-center and aren't dealing with the actual company then hang-up; in the event their servers crash you should be able to talk directly with them and not a third party. Also make sure their features will fit your needs as this is vital to the success of your business and the continuation of your online presence. I hope this article has helped shed some light on the misconception that free ecommerce hosting invariably is accompanied by poor service as that definitely is not the case!
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