Awards & Accolades

ekmPowershop (www.ekmpowershop.com) bills itself as ‘easy to use’ and promises ‘instant result’. It’s meant for people with little or no experience of payment software, and for a monthly fee of £20, you can set up a fully operational e-commerce shop.

Put simply, when you sign up to ekmPowershop, you get a blank space on their servers where you can add your logos, text, product categories, and pictures of the products themselves. You have the choice of integrating the software onto an existing web site or using it on its own as a place to sell your goods.

The service is good because the site is updated regularly, and the technologies that your site relies on aren’t allowed to go out of date. There is real customer support (not just a robot), and because you don’t have to install any software, you’re less likely to need help anyway. You also get a complimentary search engine submission and a secure server as standard.

Of All the web-based solutions in our shopping cart software round up, ekmpowershop is by far the easiest to use. Building a site is simply a matter of navigating through clearly-labelled sections and clicking on the options you want. Its more like buying from a online shop than building one.

The cart itself is hosted by ekmpowershop so theres no need to muck around with FTP to get the site operating.

The program supports offline orders telephone and fax orders, cash on delivery, bank transfers and offline card processing together with WorldPay, Protx, Paypal, HSBC, nochex and ePDQ.

Making a shop in physical terms is pretty difficult to do by yourself, requiring paper work, stock and masses of money. Fortunately, starting a business on the internet doesn't need all of these things, and thanks to ekmPowershop it doesn't even require software.

ekmPowershop is an entirely web-hosted program that lets users design and maintain a shop online, which they can construct with the minimum of know-how. Starting with a simple blank screen, users decide on the name of shop, how the items are arranged, the text and colour, along with a number of other functions. There is even the option to contact the site administrators and alter a design template to cater to your needs.

8 / 10 - Simple to use, No Installation required. Editors Choice.

When I created my first online shop a desktop application was the only choice, so I settled on [a competitor]. I found keeping the online shop up-to-date with the latest prices an increasing frustrating experience, though, as it required an upload everytime I made even the tiniest change. Keeping track of orders was also a major problem.

When the frustration became too much to bear, I looked for a hosted solution and settled on ekmPowershop, a UK-based provider. It's a vast improvement, as all changes are made interactively within the web browser and, crucially, all orders are stored online for more to access from anywhere.