UK2 Ecommerce Hosting package includes the following:

• UNLIMITED products and pages
• WIDE SELECTION of payment options
• SEARCH ENGINE friendly pages
• ONLINE help guides
• MONEY Back Guarantee

UK2

Their prices are £8.99, £18.99 and £39.99 per month for the ecommerce hosting packages named one, two, three. The last one also offers one month free and free domain name. They have also powerful product catalogue which is interesting.

Go to 123-Reg UK’s Ecommerce hosting page

If you have a small business and want to sell maximum 150 products online, package one should suffice. However, if you are a medium business with up to 1000 product to sell online at your ecommerce website, go for package two. And finally package three is for big business.

All the packages come with credit card, paypal and click and buy options which are essential to receive payments online. You should also note that for credit card payments, you should have set up relationship with a payment solution provider such as 2co, authorize or nochex.

Package two and three come with uk and com domain names included. And other features include Free SSL, Online and phone support, Products, Categories, Subcategories, Google advertising vouchers, Google AdSense implementation, Product slideshow, 100+ Templates, Freely designable pages, Simple page editor, Online shopping basket, Add shipping costs, various shipping methods, Card payments, PayPal, Click and buy, translation to different languages, currencies, Ready for Trusted Shop certification for package two and three, Ready for Safebuy certification for package two and three, Mailboxes, enough Mailbox size, Aliases, Online management, Import / export functionalities.

Home eShop: £4.99 pm (truely for a home business)

Business eShop: £9.99 pm (suggested for small businesses)

Business Pro eShop: £24.99 (Suggested for any business)

Professional eShop: £44.99 (really serious big businesses)

Go to 1and1 eCommerce (eShop) Hosting Plans Page

Setup: 1 and 1 packages come with easy Setup Wizard forEasily setup your eShop, Shop Designer for easily choosing a layout for your shop with our toolkit and adapt it to your needs, eShop Control Panel, Customisable Texts, Preview Function to view your shop before publishing

Ebay integration: It is a fascinating feature offered by 1 an 1. Not many ecommerce hosting companies offer this functionality. 1 and 1 ecommerce hosting packages include Free Image Administration for Items Offered on eBay and Scheduled Publishing for Extended selling options at eBay

Marketing Tools: 1&1 has done a great job by offering various marketing tools for your ecommerce shop, as you will come to a point to realize that setting up your online shop with hosting is just the beginning of your business online and you need a lot of targeted traffic to attract customers.

I really like 1 & 1’s marketing tools such as 1&1 Coupon Code Tool to design, perform and control coupon campaigns easily, 1&1 Ad-Efficiency Monitor to advertise more successful with price search engines, RatePoint to receive customer feedback with this powerful response tool, Pangora Product Search to promote your shop on shopping portals, Google Product Search integration to promote your items on Google product pages, Kelkoo Product Search which is another key shopping search tool and Google Sitemaps which is away to submit your new online shop’s sitemap (all product pages) to Google so that your product pages will have better chances to be indexed by Google.

eShop Management: Most of the 1 and 1 ecommerce hosting comes with various essential eshop features such as Downloadable Items if you want to sell downloadable items like ebooks, photos, music, etc. in your eShop, Stock Management, Bundle Items (Sets) for Bundles of different items, Base price calculation, Discounts, Discounts for special customers / discounts on items, Tax Calculation for national and international taxes, Support for Multiple Currencies for international business, Change Format of Numbers, Currency and Date, Logo and URL of Manufacturer to show the manufacturer’s logo and URL with an item, Changing Format of Addresses, E-mail Templates to create standard responses for all your needs.

Security of your shop: all 1and1 ecommerce web hosting packages come with free Secure Transactions (SSL) and Ready for TrustedShop Certification for which some of the other ecommerce hosting providers charge. These certificates play a crucial role in gaining the trust of your customers.

Online Payment Options: All 1 and 1 hosting packages come with PayPal integration which is a secure and reliable online payment method, Offline Payment Methods such as cheques, COD and cash, Online Payment Methods such as Sage Pay and RBS WorldPay. Here, it is an interesting feature to accept payments offline, which is not offerent most of the ecommerce web hosting providers.

Order & Invoice Management: 1and1 provides very easy administration for received orders with additional Folders for your Orders and also a very handy PDF Invoicing and Delivery Receipts functionality.

There are various other features 1 and 1 ecommerce hosting plans offer such as Recommendations (“Tell A Friend”) option and Item Overview and Item Detail with Zoom Picture. And all 1 and 1 plans come with unlimited monthly traffic allowed which is important as you will have more and more visitors coming to your online shop some point and you won’t need to upgrade your hosting plan. The webspace offered as 5, 20, 40 and 80GB are also very descent and sufficient levels for each plan.

Verdict on 1an1 ecommerce hosting: These guys really know this ecommerce shop business; they seem to have understood everything that an online shop owner would need to set up, market, manage an ecommerce website. The prices are very competitive and support is great. So, I would recommend 1and1 without any hesitation.

Go to 1and1 eCommerce (eShop) Hosting Plans Page

They also have an ongoing £1 promotion for the beginner webshop (you pay £1 pm for the first 6 months). Other packages like Advanced Shop and Premium Shop are £19.90 and £39.90 pm.

Go to STRATO Webshops

STRATO offers everything you need to build an online store:

Setup of Shop: Strato hosting pretty confident that you can create your entire shop online with your browser only and it also offers optimization of your. It also comes with a well organised hierarchical product groups. Maximum number of products for beginner shop is 100 which is ok for a small business online shop. And it is 1000 at advanced shop and 20000 for premium shop which is ideal for a large business shop.

Shop Design: Strato offers over 100 templates for various branches with demo menus and content, extensive design possibilities with preview (WYSIWYG, Drag and Drop, Inline Editing), Colour manager, Automatic Sitemap which is great for submitting to Google, Flash (intro)  which is not suggested though as search engines cannot crawl flash intros, display of promotional products, product slideshow.

Marketing tools:

PushCall – online customer contact
Google Registration
Google Sitemaps
TOP! eKomi Customer feedback  6 months trial for free!
Ciao integration
RSS Feeds
Gadgets (Youtube, LastFM, Flickr, Google Maps)
Product bundles
Product comparison
Price lists with discounts (e.g. shopping basket discounts)
eBay integration
Google Base integration
Shopping.com integration
Kelkoo integration
Product search
Advanced search function

Best UK Hosting Companies’ Ecommerce Hosting Pages:

Click Here To See All UK Ecommerce Hosting Plans In One Page!

EasilyShop
Strato UK
1and1 UK
123-Reg
Daily UK

Very cheap alternative with all sets of necessary ecommerce software and tools. If you are not bothered about the time difference between USA and UK, and if you are looking for a budget ecommerce hosting solution, then Siteground is the cheapest available hosting plan.

Go to Siteground eCommerce hosting page

HOSTGATOR
(USA-based, cheap: $7.95 pm BUT multiple domain hosting!)

Great thing about Hostgator is that you can host as many different websites or domain names as you want! You might want to create many different ecommerce online shopping websites and you can host all of them under one price which is only $7.95. So, that is the deal about Hostgator. I personally have an hostgator account and I have at least 8 websites hosted for only $7.95 pm.

Hostgator doesn’t have a specially designed ecommerce hosting page but, it offers necessary ecommerce features within the standard hosting package which will enable you to create your ecommerce website easily under account management, namely CubeCart, OS Commerce and Zen Cart which are great easy ecommerce website building tools.

Go to Hostgator unlimited hosting package page

(See Hostgator coupons which give you 1 month free at http://www.hostgatorcupons.com/)