Build an Online Store, Joomla, Hikashop

Background:

I run a one-man business which is an online retailer of arts, crafts and antiques from Thailand and South East Asia here in the UK.

I run 3 websites:

[login to view URL] (approx. 1,000 products)

[login to view URL] (approx. 70 products)

[login to view URL] (approx 500 products)

There is some product overlap between the websites with a relatively fewproducts appearing on 2 site. Products are in several product categories.

I sell on [login to view URL] and also have most of my products on amazon France and some on amazon Germany and will be expanding this soon to Spain and Italy.

I am very capable and experienced in running the back end of these websites and administering amazon sales, but I am not technical when it comes to websites.

I also have a creative background as a graphic designer, and only use Apple Mac.

Existing website set-up:

All 3 of my websites use the same basic set-up, just with a colour change and obviously different content.

The sites are Joomla websites, using a template from Joomla Bamboo called Zen Simple Shop. The back end/shopping cart is a system from Dioscouri called Tienda.

Current Problems:

Tienda is very out of date and looks like it’s going to die. It only works with old versions of Joomla and has many bugs. I’ve used ACE SEF to try and improve search engine friendliness as Tienda is terrible on its own for this. I think overall my SEF is very poor and we don’t get enough visitors to the sites.

I also only offer Paypal as a payment method as it’s been impossible to integrate Paypal Pro which would allow me to accept all other credit cards too. I have a Paypal Pro account already set up.

The Simple Shop template is also not responsive to adapting to mobiles and tablets which is a major problem.

What I would like to do:

I am happy to stick with Joomla and I would like to revamp my 3 websites so that they use another Joomla Bamboo template called Ignite as the basis of the front-end and I would like to use Hikashop for the back end.

I would intend to have all 3 sites have a common look and structure, and just use a different colour theme and branding to differentiate them.

What I need:

I want somebody to work with me and manage this process for me, integrating Hikashop and Ignite, and adjusting Ignite as we go through to fit my needs.

Very important will be how best to get all my products into Hikashop.

I would see 2 basic options here:

1. A scrape of my websites. When I first began to sell on amazon, amazon managed to do this, but it was far from perfect. Product variants generally didn’t work and only 1 image per product was transferred. Also Tienda does not hold information such as keywords for products. There was also a lot of product information such as dimensions and weights which they didn’t get. My postage model is generally weight-based.

2. I can create a spreadsheet of my total UK amazon listings, which includes most of my products from my websites though not quite everything. This will include all the key product information and keywords for searches, but won’t have the product category groups which would be used on my websites, or any images.

I’ll need some advice here on how best to take things forward and how to deal with product images – whether they can be obtained from either amazon or my own website, or whether these would need to be added manually.

I realize it might not be possible to get 100% of all info desired, but with so many products, I need to automate this process as much as possible.

Everything to be both Mac and PC compatible.

Happy to answer any additional questions.

Would like to make a start on this project soon.

A Happy Outcome:

A family of 3 new stylish, responsive , SEF friendly, Joomla websites, fully loaded with my products.

eCommerce Excel HTML Shopping Carts Website Design

Project ID: #5774116

About the project