Selling Online: how to make it painless

Lauren@digitalnarrative.com.au www.digitalnarrative.com.au

Digital marketing: big opportunities for small business

Lauren Hamilton, Digital Narrative

Selling Online: how to make it painless!

Selling online means different things to different business owners. For the few who have enjoyed a seamless transition from traditional selling methods to the world of eCommerce, it’s a license to print money while sitting at home in your pyjamas. For the rest of us, it’s a path littered with half-built and abandoned webstores and countless hours wasted on troubleshooting glitches.

If it’s a few years since you attempted to set up an online store, you’ll be pleased to know that things have gotten a lot less mindboggling in the past two years. The pandemic accelerated the need for businesses to sell online, and the companies who provide eCommerce solutions rose to the challenge with better and more intuitive tools.

So what is the best way to begin selling online or to upgrade your webstore in 2022? There are several options, with my personal preference being the first. Please note that I am in no way affiliated with any of these companies: I just know from working with over 100 small businesses what makes life easiest when you’re selling online.

1. Shopify ecommerce website

Shopify is the number one eCommerce website builder in the world, with one-in-four webstores built on this platform. It’s easy to see why: the system is literally designed to sell products online, unlike most web building platforms which are designed to showcase information like a digital brochure.

From $29 USD per month, Shopify allows you to: • design your webstore to match your branding; • add your products, organise them into categories and track your inventory; • make edits to products (adding, deleting, hiding and showing them) easily; • connect with your shipping, email marketing and social media accounts; • sell through Facebook, Instagram and

Google too; • know everything you could ever want to know about your customers, including where most find you.

You’ll likely need to hire a web developer for about half a day to get past some of the tricky stuff like configuring shipping, but in general it is straightforward enough for anyone with a moderate digital skill level to set up and manage a Shopify eCommerce website.

2. Retrofit your WordPress website

So you want to convert your existing WordPress website to an online selling machine? It’s not impossible, but it’s going to take some professional assistance and a bit of patience.

WordPress is the web building platform most web developers prefer. Over 55% of websites are built using it. If yours is one of them and you want to start selling through it, you’ll need to add either a WooCommerce or BigCommerce plugin to your store (a plugin is to your website what an app is to your phone). You’ll then need a developer to create your ‘Shop’ page and product templates before you can begin.

This option is only recommended if you’ve got a beautiful WordPress site which you’ve spent time and money on and which you now can’t bear to junk. Having said that, you can export the content of your WordPress site and import it instantly into a Shopify site, so it’s less painful to ‘switch’ than you may imagine.

WordPress can be better for SEO and more customisable from a brand perspective but in a decade of building websites for small businesses, I’ve rarely seen a WordPress site handle online shopping as well as a Shopify one, unless it is expensively modified and maintained by a developer.

My advice is to consider how much patience for aggravation and budget for troubleshooting you have before deciding to proceed with this option. If the answer is ‘not much’, consider migrating your WordPress website to a Shopify website.

3. Upgrade your other website

If you have a simple ‘drag-and-drop’ website created through Squarespace, WIX or Weebly, you may wish to stay with this familiar system so you can keep making your own website edits while adding on a ‘shop’. The good news is you can.

First, you’ll probably need to upgrade to the eCommerce or ‘Business’ package; this can cost between $10 and $27 USD extra per month. It’s then reasonably simple to add products to your new ‘Store’ or ‘Shop’ section and connect a Paypal or Stripe account to facilitate payment. Follow online instructional videos for your web builder, and consider hiring an expert for a few hours to iron out any kinks.

The main downside of this option is that these sites tend to look and perform a little more clunkily than a purpose-built eCommerce site. The experience isn’t as seamless for visitors to your site, which generally means a lower conversion rate (the percentage of people who visit your site and actually purchase). This is a key consideration if you are hoping to make a decent profit from your webstore.

Other methods

The only other options which are really feasible are to sell your products via another website (for example, an online grocer) or to sell via Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree, eBay or similar. This is a time-consuming and clumsy way to sell bulk products and is only suitable for occasional one-off items.

Simply having a ‘call us for online sales’ notice on your static website (with the ability to take a credit card over the phone) will no longer cut it. This method is becoming more antiquated with every passing month, especially when you consider that most people under the age of 40 seem to detest speaking on the phone!

Weighing the costs

Overall, as you can see, there are many ways to skin the eCommerce cat. For any of the website options, you’ll need to budget at least $1,000-$2,000 to convert or build your site.

Beyond the financial cost, however, also consider the ongoing stress and wasted time which results from having a malfunctioning, slow or low-converting website.

Sometimes it’s worth spending a bit more at the start for peace of mind and a more profitable, long-term solution in the end.