Creating Your Online Store – Best Ecommerce Store Platform
If you are ready to set up your website, this is very easy thanks to tools that practically automate the process for you. The only downside is that there isn’t as much of an ‘obvious’ choice when it comes to your ecommerce store. That is to say that no single ecommerce platform stands out in the way that WordPress does. That just means you need to think a little and pick the option that best suits your needs.
This blog will help you to make that choice and then talk you through the process of getting set up.
The Top Ecommerce Platforms to Choose From
Hosted Solutions
Hosted ecommerce platform is one that will be stored on an external website other than your own. That means you’ll create your store a little like you would add a profile to a social media site. It means less work for you but it also means you’ll have a little less flexibility.
Hosted on the other hand means that you’ll create your store by uploaded it to your server just like you uploaded WordPress to your server. Essentially this becomes a new website, or a part of your existing website.
Even once you make this decision, you’ll have a fair few options to pick from. Here are some of the top hosted platforms:
Shopify
Shopify (http://www.shopify.com/) is by far one of the most popular ecommerce solutions around and is one that nearly everyone has heard of. Like WordPress, it comes with a huge amount of support, plugins and themes meaning that you can tailor it to your exact needs and meaning that there are plenty of ways you can boost your sales. Some of these plugins let you do powerful things like tracking your visitors and integrating email marketing, or like selling digital products and delivering them automatically.
It does lack some of the customization of hosted solutions however. For example, there’s no option to create your own custom checkout page.
In terms of products, Shopify can support up to 5,000 different items, which is more than enough for most purposes. The basic Shopify membership is free but you might need to pay if you want to upgrade for more advanced features. Still, it’s not prohibitive.
Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce (https://www.bigcommerce.com/) is hosted much like Shopify and is also suitable for up to 5,000 products. It’s another solid choice but falls a little short of Shopify thanks to a higher price point. Moreover, Bigcommerce is less well-known than Shopify meaning that it doesn’t have quite the same number of plugins or features. If you want to create a store that is in any way unusual, you should probably check first to make sure that Bigcommerce can support whatever it is that you’re planning on doing.
Bigcommerce has one big advantage though and that’s that it provides excellent support for international payments out of the box. This might be a big deal if you plan on selling to the US and the UK for example and don’t know whether to display your prices in dollars or GBP.
Self-Hosted Solutions
Magento
Magento (http://www.magento.com/) is one of the best hosted solutions around in terms of its customization and features and is an excellent choice if you want to build something very unique with lots of power under the hood. This is the option that the big businesses with lots of money and tons of stock will want to use. If you have aspirations of taking on Amazon (you’re mad), then Magento is the best non-custom-built option.
Magento supports up to 50,000 items and is installed independently from your WordPress site. The downside is that it’s very fiddly and confusing if you’re a new user. In other words, unless you have a good development team behind you or you’re a developer yourself, you should probably stick with something easier at least to begin with.
And this is a point we should quickly make: when setting up your business always think about the ‘path of least resistance’. Don’t make extra work for yourself just because you want the pride of taking the less easy route – it’s not good business. Focus on keeping your overheads (time and money) low and getting quickly to the point where you can reliably start making money. Don’t let ego get in the way of good business sense!
WooCommerce
WooCommerce (http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/) is the self-hosted option that we would recommend. And what makes this such a great choice is that it is actually a WordPress theme. That means that you’re not installing anything extra at all and the whole process of setting up is incredibly simple. You just install WooCommerce as you would do any other WordPress theme and from there, you’ll have your store!
This does mean that your store is going to ‘replace’ the website you already had. This means you need to either consider this right from the start or you need to set up a secondary domain for your shop and then link the two together. Note that even if it does replace your site though, you can still have a blog on the store.
Like WordPress and like Shopify, WooCommerce has tons of support and an endless number of themes and plugins. This will make running your store significantly easier and makes it another great choice from a business perspective.
One limitation of WooCommerce though is that it can only stock 500 items max. This won’t be a problem for most businesses starting out but if you have plans to expand it’s something you certainly might want to consider.
Volusion
Volusion (http://www.volusion.com/) is a WordPress plugin but I’s also somewhat unique in a number of ways. That’s because it isn’t just an ecommerce but is also an email autoresponder and more. Volusion lets you track our visitors and your leads and see who is looking at your products and who is reading your emails. Volusion is something that many internet marketer types might feel quite at home with but note that it’s not particularly powerful or feature packed when compared with other ecommerce solutions and is really only suitable for small numbers of products.
Creating a Shopify Site
We’re not going to go through every single ecommerce platform’s set up process here. However, as Shopify and WooCommerce are probably the best hosted and self-hosted options respectively, it might be useful to look at at least these two platforms and how you get started.
Shopify offers a 14-day free trial which makes it easy to set up and start playing around and to decide if it’s the right choice for you. To get started with that, head over to Shopify’s site and then click ‘Start Your Free Trial’. From there, you’ll be prompted to enter your email address, password and name you want for your store.
Click next and you’ll be taken to a new page. Here you can add more details including your location and phone number for tax purposes.
On the next page you’ll be prompted to ‘tell [them] a little about yourself’. This involves answering a few questions such as whether you have a pre-existing store and whether you’re running the store for a client or for your own business.
And with that, you’re in! You’ll next get to select form a number of store options. In settings you can change the name of the store and you’ll also be able to start adding items to your store.
To start developing the store itself, click ‘Add Online Store’. You’ll then be given the option to choose from several themes which work just like they do on WordPress. And just like WordPress, the themes can be both free and paid. Most of the more creative themes will be found in the theme store.
Click ‘Customize Theme’ to alter the specifics of the themes and click ‘Publish Theme’ once you’re happy with it.
Browse to the next tab and you can select ‘Navigation’. This part is where you add individual pages and content. You can also choose to use either the current domain or to use your website’s domain to make your store appear hosted (so it can be found at www.example.com/shop) for example.
Adding Products
To add products, just select ‘Add Product’ from the front page. You’ll then have to enter a title and choose an image that should help to sell your product. As you can imagine, the image is rather important to make your products as desirable as possible!
You will also be able to set elements such as the price and to add details such as a description. Of course you also need to add payment details if you want to start getting paid.
With all that done, your store is ready to go live! It really is that quick and easy to start selling and to start profiting in a big way potentially.
Adding Apps
If you want to add extra functionality to your site, then you can start adding apps as well which work just like WordPress plugins to enhance the features of your store. There are numerous apps that you can add to a Shopify store and you can find them by selecting ‘Apps’ on the left hand side of the screen in the burger menu.
For example, if you want to sell digital products, then you can do this by using ‘Digital Downloads’. This app allows you to sell your products digitally and thereby make money from ebooks etc. without having to email them to your buyers.
Another great one is ‘Pre-Order Manager’. This does what it says and lets people pre-order your forthcoming products. The great thing about this is that you can use it to get people excited about your forthcoming products and to build buzz and it can even be a way to make sure there’s a market for your product before you invest too much time into creating it.
And finally for this section, consider ‘Recurring Orders’ by Boldapps. This app allows you to charge your customers on a recurring basis. This is excellent for selling your products on a regular basis – for instance if your customers want a monthly supply of protein shake, or if they want a subscription that will give them something new to read every week. Either way, recurring orders are very good for your cash flow as they provide you with a much more stable and predictable income and they convince your customers to potentially lay down more money for what you’re selling up front.
Creating a WooCommerce Store
Meanwhile, creating a WooCommerce store is even easier. All you need to do is to install WooCommerce via the WordPress ‘plugins’ store. Just search for ‘WooCommerce’ under Plugins > Add New and select it. Click ‘Install Now’ and then ‘Activate’. You’ll then be taken through some steps similar to those we looked at for Shopify. You can actually skip this to begin with though by just clicking ‘Not right now’.
It’s recommend that you do go through this process though so click ‘Continue’. On page one, you’ll be shown ‘Page Setup’. This is where you can add the four pages that your site needs in order to operate. These are: ‘Shop’, ‘Cart’, ‘Checkout’ and ‘My Account’. As you can see, each one is needed for the daily running of your site – but they operate just like any other page in on WordPress. Click ‘Continue’ to install them.
Next you will be asked to set up your store locale in order to choose your location. You can select a store currency too and set whether you want to use metric or imperial for showing the weight and dimensions of your packages. Note that if you want to, you can actually add a custom currency, though this may require a little technical knowhow.
Note also that you’ll have the option to support multiple currencies later on via plugins. Select Continue and you’ll then need to set up shipping and tax. You can choose your domestic and international flat rate shipping but you might not need to do this if you’re going to be selling digital products.
You can import tax rates, or just skip this for later. Seelct ‘Continue’ again and then choose your payment gateway. A handy thing here is that you can use PayPal, which simply requires you to enter your PayPal address.
Finally, choose whether or not you want to let WooCommerce see your site diagnostic data. Once you’ve done that, you’ll then have the option to create your first product, or to access other resources.
If you don’t want to do that, then return to the WordPress dashboard and you’ll find that it’s rather changed with new options like ‘Products’ and ‘WooCommerce’ in your menu. The WooCommerce menu lets you see your orders, coupons, ‘addons’ (plugins) etc. Under products you can change settings or add new inventory.