Robin and Marion Jones, Croque-en-Bouche, Underdown - Grooms Cottage, Gloucester Road, Ledbury, Herefordshire HR8 2JE. UK

t. +44 (0)1531 636400  f. +44 (0) 870 7066282             mail@croque.co.uk             Site problems? Please let us know, click here

I rent my dedicated webspace from NamesCo. The company has a very good reputation, and also supplies quality broadband.
If you are interested, use this link. Need advice? Ask me. I’ll get an affilliate fee, and will credit your account with me, to the value of £20 plus VAT. Domain names are best renewed through me, as I get 50% discount. I only charge you the cost price to me for domain registration and renewal anyway.

The Web is a great place to sell stuff. I sell wines and use some specialist software, but then I have a list of 450 wines to manage. The wines are in a separate database, and there’s a shopping basket and processing forms. Payment is made direct to HSBC, without my seeing any card details, which makes it doubly secure (web buyers worry about security!)

Destination Champagne is a book site. Check it out. It has only one product, a guide book. The price is different depending on where you want it sent, and you can also buy it as a download. The book is £14 but the download is a bargain £3.50, but still nicely profitable. We use a Paypal account, which is quick to set up. Punters pay them, using their existing Paypal account or a credit card. Email comes, and we send back a standard message, telling them a password to download the book. Paypal charge about 3.5% plus 20p. The rest is clear profit. And not pricey to set up.

On the Destination Champagne site you are only going to buy one copy of one product, but Paypal can do multiple purchases, and have a simple shopping basket too. Bacchus & Comus sells books, software, event tickets, allsorts. Williamson Moore sells downloads of parts of their books. Try out the Williamson Moore ‘downloads to buy’ page and see what I mean.

Costs depend on complexity. A shopping section like on my wine site would swallow £700 easy. There is a lot to set up - and test! But some basic Paypal stuff? £100 would cover it.

An added extra that is useful is ‘Website Traffic Reporting’. For £6.50 per month we can know exactly who is visiting, when, which pages are looked at and how many pages per visit. And what keywords they are using to find you in Google. Helps tuning your site no end.