Create Your Own Online Store in a Weekend

Alannah Moore

• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781616892364
• eBook ISBN: 9781616894092
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: E-Commerce
• Index: Business

The advantages of selling your products online are many—low overhead, global markets, twenty-four-hour shopping—but perhaps most important is the level playing field offered by the internet. With a distinctive product and professional-looking website, you stand as much of a chance at success as anyone, even if others have more money to invest. In Create Your Own Online Store in a Weekend, Alannah Moore guides entrepreneurs through the process of setting up an online business and creating a website that fits both their products and their budget. This accessible primer provides detailed information on how to set up and provide content for your site as well as the right storefront and payment solutions. Moore addresses all aspects of running an online business, including marketing, order management, and boosting sales. Whether you are selling goods, services, or downloadable files, this guide will help you find the e-commerce solution that's right for you.

1 E-commerce basics

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE EASIER WAYS OF SELLING ONLINE, AND WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU BEGIN.

“Traditional” online selling VS. THE QUICKER, EASIER WAYS

The “from-scratch” method of selling online involves setting up a website, installing shopping cart software, and integrating it with a payment gateway to deposit payments into your internet merchant account, as well as optionally integrating it with email mailing list software, a customer database, and stock control software, among others. You also need to make sure your site is secure and that it conforms to legal requirements. If this sounds complicated, that’s because it is—it’s fiddly, it needs technical expertise, and requires significant financial investment.

Happily, the alternative systems that we’ll be looking at in this book have been created specially to make the whole process easier. By rolling some of these elements together and implementing an interface that lets the user control the look of their site without coding knowledge, they make the task of getting yourself an online selling system much more accessible and dramatically reduce time spent and money invested.

Online selling systems—at least, the ones we’ll be looking at together—can be divided into three groups.

1. A “STOREFRONT” ON AMAZON OR EBAY

Setting up a storefront on one of these large “marketplace” sites is an extremely fast and low-cost way of getting your products out there. As well as speed, cost, and ease of setup, another huge advantage is that you’ll have access to their giant customer base and get instant traffic to your store, while at the same time benefitting from their brand.

The downside is that your store clearly isn’t entirely your own, which makes presenting your individual brand hard, so in time you’ll probably want to set up your own webstore, separate from Amazon or eBay. But using the infrastructure of one of these online giants is an excellent way of testing your products and prices, and of building a client base without any significant financial outlay.

TERMINOLOGY

The term “storefront” is also widely used to refer to any kind of online store, however in this book, to avoid confusion, we’ll be using it to refer to this way of selling via a larger marketplace. Also in this category are storefronts on Etsy, Boticca, and a host of other marketplace options—see here.

Setting up a storefront with Amazon or eBay is a quick and economic way of selling your products, bringing you lots of instant traffic, but it doesn’t allow you much room for branding. Above: stores.ebay.com/historicimages-store.

2. A WEBSTORE

A webstore is an all-in-one system that comprises the site design with hosting and a built-in shopping cart. You need to input your payment details (more about this in Chapter 3) and your site content, product info, and so on, and you’re ready to go.

The advantages of this kind of system are that you have a choice of great-looking templates that you can modify, you don’t have to worry about technicalities or security, and the system is very easy to use. Additionally, a host of add-ons make it easy to integrate your all-in-one webstore with other needs such as mailing list systems and inventory control. Obviously, there are costs associated with such a service that make it more expensive to run a webstore than to sell via Amazon or eBay, or to do the whole thing yourself using the WordPress system.

TERMINOLOGY

Like “storefront,” the term “webstore” is often used to refer to any kind of online shop; here we’ll use it to refer to an all-in-one system, to make a clear distinction between the two.

Setting up your store via a webstore provider gives you your own online presence. It’s quick and easy to set up and removes the hassle of hosting your own site. Above: www.cookbookvillage.com set up with Shopify.

3. WORDPRESS

WordPress is a free software system that you can use to run an online store on your own web host.

This is a great solution if you want your own store but you don’t have the budget for an all-in-one webstore system with its monthly payments. While the setup is not too technical, it is not as straightforward as using a webstore system and does require a certain amount of application.

Wonderful-looking professional templates will make your site look as good as it would using an all-in-one webstore s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 E-commerce
• 2 Preparing to set up
• 3 Taking payment online
• 4 The look of the site
• 5 The content of the site
• 6 In focus: storefronts
• 7 In focus: webstores
• 8 In focus: WordPress
• 9 Running your online store
• 10 Marketing
• 11 The search engines
• 12 Social media
• 13 Email marketing
• 14 Increasing your sales
• 15 Legalities
• Resources
• Glossary
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright