Product Reviews

It's often said that the internet lets anyone set up shop. While that's true, it can be hard work making an online store look good and ensuring that people can find it. Hosting company 1&1 thinks it has solved that problem with its eShop package.

It's a service that allows you to enter the details of your business and the products that you sell, via your browser, choose a template and have a set of shop pages generated automatically at the web address of your choice. All the complicated aspects of taking money are sorted out for you, with an integrated shopping cart that supports PayPal, Protx and WorldPay, although for

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the latter two you'll need to pay the appropriate monthly fees. To help people find the shop, you can automatically list your products on eBay and submit them to sites such as Kelkoo.

Setting up shop is quite straightforward, with an online wizard that asks for your basic business details, before you get into the harder task of entering product information, weights, shipping details and so on. It's not too difficult, but can be tedious. A new product is entered in a pop-up window and to add a photo another window pops up. Luckily, you can import your product data from a spreadsheet, and there's even an example you can download to see how all the columns should be set up, which is a thoughtful touch.

We found the site design tool, where you select templates, a bit quirky. The button to confirm a choice was hidden by the template thumbnails. But on the whole, it's easy to get an eShop up and running. The £12 package is good for people trying online selling for the first time, especially with links to eBay and submission to services such as Kelkoo. It's a shame it lacks options for stock control and variants such as sizes and colours. For these, you have opt for the £29 monthly option.