Kate
I actually thought coke was minging until I was about 12, that why I used the example (Love it now by the way)
Thanks for the complement about the shop front

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Designer Sunglasses

Butting in. You'll find that most of the eshop owners in this forum have built their own sites from scratch and with zero knowledge of html. Take a look at Blush's shop as a shining example. It's an ongoing build for her, she tweaks and adds every day and is doing a brilliant job, she is also the first to say that anyone can do it. If you look at the Zen Cart (no, I don't have shares in the company or any other interest) you'll find that it gives you, essentially, a ready-made shop with ecommerce facilities. There are various templates you can use or you can design your own. And it's free. All you need then is a host for your domain name which, as Lawrence has said, can cost as little as £50 per annum. Success or failure is then up to you and isn't dependent on how other people view the host (Lycos), which means that the sky's the limit.

I'll now butt out again and hope to have added a bit more help.

Kate

I'm very surprised that Lycos haven't given you FTP access to your site, some of their hosting plans do. Can you not even access the files via a web based file manager?

I don't know what the ratio of the use of all in one ecommerce solutions to stand alone packages is. The majority of people I deal with tend to be ex (or existing) eBay, Tazbar, eBid etc traders who frequent their forums. The most common ecommerce solutions they use are ZenCart, OsCommerce, CRELoaded and Actinic, the first three are free, Actinic is commercial. MrSite, another all in one package is also quite popular, though this has the same disadvantages as Lycos, 1&1 etc.

You don't need HTML, PHP knowledge etc to run one of the other stores, it helps but isn't a necessity, though you will pick up bits and pieces as you go. As Kate said, Tinkerbell is the perfect example, she jumped in with no knowledge and is now importing stock and planning to open a real B&M shop to complement her website.

The exported Lycos excel file should be able to be imported into other apps with a bit of tweaking. There's an add-on for Zen called EZPopulate which helps with importing data from other stores. You "should" be able to use your Lycos data in the ecommerce application of your choice. Worst case scenario is that you would have to copy and paste the data into their respective fields. I searched a few forums to see if anyone had tried this with a Lycos store, though all I could find was some people who had attempted to install Zen on Lycos hosting.

My suggestion to anyone looking for an open source store is to use ZenCart, if you're willing to wait a bit then hang on for the production version of Magento to be released (expected Q1 2008). If you'd rather use commercial software and therefore have backup from the company that created it, then checkout the likes of OpenMind or Actinic.

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Lawrence

Lawrence, there is FTP access. It's just that I haven't a clue as to how to use it.


As I said earlier, I am very happy with my Lycos shop at the moment and I've tweaked it considerably since I first set it up, so its almost where I want it to be. I would be interested in having options as a contingency plan because as you said earlier, you can't trust any company 100%, so thanks very much for your comments and input.
I apologise again to everyone if I came across a bit crass in my earlier posts- I was having a bad day and then got all defensive when someone bad mouthed Lycos (don't know why because I don't have shares in them either )

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Designer Sunglasses

Don't worry, we can soon change that. To access your site you need an FTP client such as http://www.download.com/3640-2160_4-10634986.html

Once you've installed your FTP client, set it up for your hosting. There's three things you will need to give it

FTP server
U/N
P/W

It will also ask you for a name, this is just a label so use whatever you want such as "BlackRhino".

Once that is done, moving files mack an forth between your PC and server is as easy as copying files from one folder to another on your PC.

To test it, create a file called hello.html containing

Then upload it to the root of your website. You will then be able to access it via your browser with www.blackrhino.co.uk/hello.html

Once you can do that, you'll then be able upload images, custom files or anything else you might want to put on the server as well as being able to customise your store's files and back them up.

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Lawrence

Thanks for that Lawrence, I'll give that a bash.
Check out this link into the problem with my PR that everyone was getting in a lather about:
http://forums.seochat.com/google-pag...re-165034.html

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Designer Sunglasses

That's the same thing I mentioned earlier in this thread Page Rank Checker Tools Sabotaged by Google? Google seem to be trying to stop other sites accessing their PR figures.

It's not quite the same as we were discussing before though. The data centres were showing PR for other sites but not yours, neither was the Google toolbar but I've found something very strange indeed. If you click a direct link to your homepage as in www.theblackrhino.co.uk it will show PR1, but if you then type the same address into the address bar it shows PR0, also if you copy and paste the address from the address bar (which is different from the one you click) while it's showing PR1 into another tab or window it will show PR0. Exactly the same page, exactly the same URL, yet different PRs displayed. You have PR1 displayed if you reach your homepage via a referral link, but not if it's accessed directly Go figure!

The only thing I can assume is that it's due to some mod_rewrite rule that Lycos use to forward your domain to their webspace confusing the Google PR system. It's certainly not a major issue, but it is curious though.

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Lawrence

Hello everyone, this is my first post here, found the forum looking for answers to the vanity domain feature. Didnt want to start a new thread as I thought better to continue this one.

I have a Lycos Eshop, the shop itself is not too bad but customer service in non existent.

Anywho, the problem I have is that I tried following what Black Rhino suggested above but to no avail.

My online store is http://www.lycoseshop.com/epages/autocare_es.sf and my business website is www.autocare.es with a link to the online store as http://tienda.autocare.es now the problem is when I choose the vanity domain option it gives me a new url address for the store which is http://www.autocare.es/epages/autocare_es.sf but the website does not work under that url.

Anyone have an idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks