Why You Need A NameHero E-Commerce Package

A short while ago, NameHero launched its new website builder – a product that allows complete beginners to get started with hosting their website. I’d written an introductory blog post about the service, explaining some of the salient features. Notably, it’s free for the first week, so customers can actually start building their website to get a feel for whether or not it’s something they might be interested in. We’d also talked about how WordPress might be an all round superior package, but it has the drawback of not being too user friendly. Hence the space for something like the website builder.

Free Package Limitations

Apart from the obvious limitation of being free only for 7 days, the basic NameHero builder package has several other limitations. Notably in terms of storage space, e-mail accounts, forwarding, and the inability to include e-commerce functionality.

When you decide to convert your free account into a full-fledged product, you have the following three options:

• Personal Builder
• Business Builder
• E-commerce Builder

Here’s a screenshot showing the three different types of packages and their pricing:

One thing you’ll notice immediately, is that the website builder packages are more expensive than ordinary shared hosting. This is because it costs a lot more to offer. All the themes and plugins that come with the website builder have associated licenses, and those have to be included in the cost of hosting. So this is actually a great motivation for someone to learn a more advanced system like WordPress. You get the flexibility along with lower costs!

You Need the E-Commerce Suite for a Business

The most important thing to keep in mind is that if you want to host an e-commerce site where you accept payments on your website, you have to subscribe to the e-commerce module. If you already have a free trial account, you can get started by visiting your dashboard, where your existing trials – both expired and continuing –  are displayed as shown here:

Now you need to click on your trial builder package and hit the “Upgrade” button. This will then present you with the options to upgrade as shown in the first screenshot. From here, you need to select the e-commerce package. Once you subscribe, the related themes and payment functionalities will be unlocked for your account.

E-Commerce Websites Have Stricter Legal Compliance Requirements

One of the reasons why e-commerce is a separate package is because in order to accept payments on your site using credit card processors like Visa or Mastercard, your infrastructure needs to be certified with something called the “PCI DSS”. This stands for “Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). This is a set of protocols and standards – both hardware and software – that are designed to imbue a level of security into online transactions.

For this reason, the e-commerce package is a separate item of its own and costs more than the others.

E-Commerce Websites Need More Power Too

Another reason why the e-commerce package costs more, is that by its very nature, shopping cart websites are limited in how much data caching they can use to improve page load speeds. Every customer’s cart is different, and when you log into your account, the information shown is personalized to you.

This places a high amount of stress on the database and the backend, which means you need faster systems to handle the load, with lower density servers, and in some cases, specialized optimizations for the infrastructure as well.

For these reasons, the NameHero e-commerce package is the most pricey of the three. The benefit is that all the hassle of creating a payment setup is taken away from you. You just need to drag and drop the elements into place, provide some configuration details, and you can start accepting payments on your website immediately!

Bottom Line

The NameHero Builder e-commerce package is a necessity if you want to set up a store on your site, compare features of products and accept payments. It also gives you access to a lot more features such as expanded storage, and lightweight servers to handle the special demands of payment systems!