Remote Nation

Full Scale E-Commerce Platforms

Shopify

Shopify is a full scale hosted e-commere platform that allows you to quickly and easily get online with a beautifully designed template. They’ve also partnered with Stripe.com to offer their own payment gateway called Shopify Payments, which offers competitive transaction fees with other gateways. If you use Shopify Payments, Shopify will waive store specific transaction fees, and you’ll only have to pay the gateway transaction fees.

Out of all the e-commerce solutions out there, Shopify has one of the best back-end interface designs and collection of 3rd party integrations. The quality of available themes is extremely good and the Liquid templating engine on which they are built allows for almost unlimited customization of the store’s functionality and appearance.

Shopify has been a pioneer in the Ruby on Rails e-commerce development space and has open sourced a number of components that run Shopify. These projects include an e-commerce payment library called Active Merchant, a templating engine called Liquid, a shipping library called Active Shipping, and a number of others. Knowing that this is the technology that powers Shopify should give you a lot of confidence in the quality of the back-end and the Shopify team’s commitment to continued development of their product. This open source strategy along with their robust API has enabled Shopify to build one of the most well supported communities of 3rd party apps.

Shopify also provides an in store sales option and POS software that allows you to accept credit cards in person. This tablet ready POS app integrates seamlessly with the online store.

Use Shopify if you want a full featured hosted e-commerce solution that provides almost unlimited customization and integration options. You can sign up for a free shopify account and try out all of their features.

• Cost: Monthly Fee + Per Transaction Fee* + Gateway Fees (*Per Transaction Fees Waived if you use Shopify Payments Gateway)
• Themes: Free & Premium Themes + Customizable CSS + Liquid Templating Engine
• Supported Gateways: Numerous + Shopify Payments
• Transaction Fees: 2.9% + 30¢ or lower (Waived with Shopify Payments)
• Extras: Extensive High Quality Themes & Plugins, Quality Native Mobile Apps, POS System, Free Mobile Credit Card Reader, Product Reviews, Discount Codes, Customizable Email Templates, Built-In Analytics and Reporting
• Trial: Unlimited Free Trial (Pay When You’re Ready to Accept Real Money)
• Multi-Language Support: Yes
• Weaknesses: No Free Option
• Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a full-scale hosted e-commerce platform that allows you to fully customize the design and functionality of your e-commerce website. This solution will handle your entire website including static content, blog, social media integration, online store, and order fulfillment tracking.

In recent years, BigCommerce has launched an app store that includes a variety of partner apps that automatically integrate with the platform such as, Facebook, Constant Contact, MailChimp, LivePerson, Shipwire, and many others. BigCommerce offers a number of pre-designed and customizable themes to help you get your online store up and running quickly. Pricing starts out at $29.95 / month with a 10% discount for yearly payment.

The theme editor for BigCommerce is not as full featured as the Liquid template engine included with Shopify, but it does include an easy to use visual theme editor that will enable you to easily change color schemes and other aspects of the theme without getting into the code.

Use BigCommerce if you’re interested in an online only presence with a full-scale customizable e-commerce website.

• Cost: Monthly Fee + Per Transaction Fee + Gateway Fees
• Supported Gateways: Over 65. They probably have what you’re looking for.
• Transaction Fees: 1.5% (Waived if you upgrade to the Gold Plan @ $79.95 / mo)
• Extras: Easy Facebook Shop, Custom Templating Engine, Built-In Product Reviews, Single-page checkout, Abandoned cart saver, Side-by-side product comparisons
• Trial: 15 Day Free Trial
• Multi-Language Support: No
• Overall Rating: 4 out of 5

SpreeCommerce

SpreeCommerce started out as the premier open source Ruby on Rails e-commerce plugin. The platform is still open source and can be downloaded for free and modified as needed. SpreeCommerce also formed a commercial open source initiative and a certified partner program that has caused it to gain significant traction. This partner program includes hosting and development partners that can help you build and host a fully customized e-commerce solution. Spree is quickly becoming the new de facto open source e-commerce solution.

The folks behind SpreeCommerce also created Wombat, which they call the E-Commerce Operating System. The idea behind Wombat is to become the common clearinghouse for all E-Commerce related data and systems such as accounting, shipping, fulfillment, inventory management, etc. Wombat supports a number of popular 3rd party applications with more being added all the time.

Overall SpreeCommerce will end up providing a significant amount of customizability. However, prepare to leverage a Ruby on Rails developer if you choose this route. If your application requires special integrations, functionality, or other aspects that are not covered in an out-of-the-box solution, SpreeCommerce may be a great place to start.

Use SpreeCommerce if your e-commerce application requires unique customizations and you have a bigger development budget to pull these things off.

• Cost: Free + Hosting + Gateway Fees
• Supported Gateways: All Active Merchant Gateways
• Transactional Fees: None
• Extras: All integrations supported by Wombat
• Trial: Free Sandbox Account on Spreecommerce.com
• Multi-Language Support: Yes
• Overall Rating: 4 out of 5

E-Commerce Plugins

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is designed to work as a WordPress Plugin. If you have a WordPress website and you’re looking to stick with WordPress as your primary CMS, WooCommerce could be a good add-on option to e-commerce enable a portion of your site. As with any WordPress based application, expect a fair amount of hacking to get things to function the way that you desire.

WooCommerce rides on top of the WordPress platform as a basic plugin and also supports a variety of extensions that allow you to customize the functionality of the platform. You will be able to manage customers and orders directly in your WordPress back-end. You won’t pay for WooCommerce directly, but you will likely pay for one or more extensions to get WooCommerce to do everything you need it to do.

Use WooCommerce if you want to host your own WordPress based e-commerce site and you don’t mind hacking with WordPress and the WooCommerce extensions a bit to get things to work just the way you want.

• Cost: Free + Hosting + Gateway Fees
• Supported Gateways: A wide variety via the WooCommerce Extensions Library
• Transaction Fees: None
• Extras: WooCommerce Themes & Plugins
• Trial: You Must Download and Install on Your WordPress Installation
• Multi-Language Support: Yes
• Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5

FoxyCart

FoxyCart is a lightweight JavaScript based E-Commerce plugin that rides on top of any website. FoxyCart is really all about the cart+checkout flow. This solution will leave the layout of the store and product pages up to the developer or designer implementing FoxyCart, so don’t expect a turn-key e-commerce store with this solution. On the upside, you’ll be able to control the user experience on your e-commerce site using whatever CMS you are currently running.

All FoxyCart plans come with unlimited products, discount codes, users, shipping options, bandwidth, support, etc. You’ll pay a low monthly fee and a very low fixed transaction fee for sales beyond a certain level depending on the plan you select.

Use FoxyCart if you want to install a simple e-commerce store on an existing website that gives you full manual control over the presentation of the store and products. Expect a relatively robust back-end that does not offer inventory management.

• Cost: Free + Hosting + Gateway Fees
• Themes: Basic Styles + Customizable CSS
• Supported Gateways: Numerous 3rd Party Gateways
• Transaction Fees: First 100 – 1000 transactions / mo free / 5¢ – 15¢ thereafter
• Extras: Basic Styles
• Trial: Unlimited Free Trial (Pay When You’re Ready to Accept Real Money)
• Multi-Language Support: No
• Weaknesses: No Inventory Management, Not a Full Featured CMS
• Overall Rating: 4.25 out of 5

E-Commerce Widgets

Gumroad

Gumroad is a simple lightweight hosted e-commerce widget that is great if you just want to sell one or two digital products and don’t want to bother with a full featured platform. It is one of the simplest and easiest to use e-commerce widgets available. It really shines if you’re selling digital downloads, but will also support physical goods as well.

Gumroad is ideal for independent filmmakers, musicians, and writers. You can also build Gumroad right into your iOS or Android app using their native libraries and sell things like audio books, videos, or other digital media through your apps.

Gumroad ships with an onboard credit card gateway, so you won’t need to secure your own. This widget is incredibly easy to get started with and requires the least amount of commitment to get started. One of the drawbacks is the amount of time it takes for you to receive the money that you’ve made through Gumroad. Gumroad pays you via PayPal every two weeks. Most of the other solutions get the money into your account via bank transfer within 2 – 3 days of the sale on an ongoing basis. Still, if simple is what you’re looking for, you don’t need to go much further than Gumroad.

Use Gumroad if you want to sell a digital product on an existing website or via an existing mobile app.

• Cost: Free for up to 10 products – $99/mo + Gateway Fees
• Themes: Basic Styles + Customizable CSS
• Supported Gateways: Numerous as listed on the Ecwid.com website
• Transaction Fees: None
• Extras: Native Android and iOS Library
• Trial: Free Plan (Pay for more products or features)
• Multi-Language Support: Limited
• Weaknesses: Long delay before funds reach your account, No inventory, Limited Physical Goods Fulfillment Management, Not a Full Featured CMS
• Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Ecwid

Ecwid stands for “e-commerce widget” and it effectively works as it is described. Ecwid can be installed on top of any existing website or social media presence. Like Foxycart, you install Ecwid using a few lines of Javascript.

For being a widget, Ecwid has a very robust back-end and even handles inventory and fulfillment management. Unlike Gumroad, you can use Ecwid for a full scale e-commerce initiative.

Use Ecwid if you want to install a lightweight e-commerce store on an existing website that has a fully featured back-end.

• Cost: Free for up to 10 products – $99/mo + Gateway Fees
• Themes: Basic Styles + Customizable CSS
• Supported Gateways: Numerous as listed on the Ecwid.com website
• Transaction Fees: None
• Extras: Facebook App, WordPress + Joomla + Drupal Plugins, API
• Trial: Free Plan (Pay for additional features)
• Multi-Language Support: Yes
• Weaknesses: Limited Integrations, Not a Full Featured CMS, Limited theme customizations
• Overall Rating: 4 out of 5

Audio / Voice

We do a lot of voice calls all day long, every day. For a long time, we used Skype exclusively. More recently, we’ve switched to Google Hangout for our smaller team calls and Skype for our larger calls (more on that later). And like you, we also talk with clients who use a variety different audio tools to communicate without being in the same room.

Here is what not to do:

• Do not use the built-in speaker and mic in your laptop. The problem here is that the mic in your laptop is far away from your mouth and is designed to pick up audio from the entire room. It’s better to use a headset with a boom that places the mic directly in front of your mouth.
• Do not use a wireless headset. We’ve found that these things last about 3 – 4 months tops before they break. They are also prone to interference or dying batteries. This is the last thing you want to worry about while you’re in the middle of a call with people. These are not things we have to deal with when we’re interacting person to person, so it’s best to just eliminate the possibility of problems by going direct with a cable.
• Do not use a USB headset. We’ve found that USB headsets will produce garbled Darth Vader like sound or interference from time to time. Usually, you can remedy this by disconnecting and reconnecting your USB headset, but this is not something you want to have to mess with in the middle of a call with people. If you stay away from USB headsets and go direct into your computer’s sound input jack, you’ll eliminate another potential cause for problems.
• Avoid phone based conference call bridges whenever possible. The main problem here is that most phone bridges are low fidelity audio. Computer audio like Skype and Google Hangouts leverage HD Audio, which we’ve found to make an enormous difference when communicating as a team. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes to pick up the subtle nuances and tones of voice that you can with HD Audio.

Our recommended audio gear for the Solo Road Warrior:

• A headset with passive noise canceling boom mic (like this Sennheiser). By the way, I have used the one linked for almost 2 years without fail. Removing all the wireless, USB, active noise canceling, complicated nonsense, just leaves a solid performing and reliable headset.
• If you use a mac, you’ll need to get one of these to plug directly into your Macbook Pro or other Mac computer. This will also let you use the headset with your mobile phone if you want.

Conference room audio setup on a budget:

• I’ve done a lot of research into the ideal conference room mic. I’ve tried the Blue Snowball Mic, this Audio Technica Condenser Mic (which will make you sound like a radio DJ), and others. We’ve found that this MXL AC404 does the best job of picking up audio from throughout the conference room, while canceling out sound generated from the speakers. We recently replaced another conference room mic with the MXL AC404 in 2018 and the difference was night and day. Amazing product!
• For speakers, we’ve used these simple Bose Multimedia speakers. If the person on the other end is using one of the headsets above, it basically sounds like they are right in the room with you.

Video Calls

Video is still remarkably hard to get right, but current state video has reached the point where it adds significant value to interactions. We’ve used Skype, Google Hangouts, Google Meet, Zoom, Slack, and other solutions for video calls. Almost all of these solutions work pretty good and some have their quirks. We’ve found that the most important thing to consider when doing video calls is to have good internet upload bandwidth and a good camera. Unfortunately, the cameras built into most laptop computers are middle of the road. They’ll work and add value, but there are several after market cameras that you can get to make you look more clear and to push highre resolution, like this HD Logitech camera.

For conference room setups, a newer entrant into this space is the innovative Meeting Owl 360 degree camera. This camera has 360 degree audio and video coverage and auto focuses the camera on whoever is talking. It is a little pricey, but if you want the best possible experience blended with a conference room setting, it is worth considering.

We’ve also tested the LG UltraFine 5K Monitor. People have a love/hate relationship with this particular monitor, but the camera built into this monitor is superb. I personally, have appreciated the video clarity on this monitor as well and have not really had any issues with it paired with my Macbook Pro.