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Are you struggling to put your products up for sale on your website? Here we look at the very easiest ways to get trading everywhere your customers could be online
Adding Products to Your Existing Website
It really does matter what platform your existing website was built with. The tool used to create and edit a website is your CMS and this often determines how this is going to go down.
The most popular CMS in the World for a regular (brochure) site is WordPress, adding an online store means installing Woo Commerce as a plugin. According to review sites, Woo Commerce is the second most popular way to host an online store.
The user experience your customers end up with is determined by the capability of your designer and the design plugins you combine it with. Really this is for advanced users and web developers to work with so going for it self service is ambitious.
Other popular website platforms like Wix and Square Space offer their add-ins to enable you to add products and take payment online. But the undisputed number one for all the most beautiful online stores is Shopify. It was built for the job, it’s an online store first and web pages second. Where as WordPress Wix and Square Space are pages first, store second in our opinion.
Purpose Built Ecommerce Platforms
There are lots on the market, most of them are designed to be used by developers in web agencies. Magento for example needs pros who understand code, ftp uploading and hosting etc. GeminiBlue helps companies to select and then implement the best software for their tech stack.
Shopify was designed for store owners to use themselves and has empowered many thousands of entrepreneurs to setup fast and trade online. A competent user can learn and do it all DIY. However, the whole thing happens much faster and at a lower cost when a Shopify services partner does the work for you.
GeminiBlue is an official Shopify UK partner and we love to work with business that are already on Shopify or completely new to it. To see the what’s involved in getting started view the Shopify Compass guide.
Your Old Web Designer
If your trying to change your website and you’ve reached the limits of your editing know-how, it’s time to call you web guy. Right? Erm… That might depends on a few things:
- What they built the site with originally
- What you’re paying
- How busy they are
If you originally paid for a “standard” brochure website with a homepage and content pages, it might not have been built with a CMS that easily copes with adding an online store. No agency is going to want to tell you that what you paid for isn’t going to be fit for purpose so the risk is you end up paying money and time into fitting a square peg in a round hole.
If it wasn’t originally intended to be an online store, there could be a big saving of time and money by starting again on a proper ecommerce platform like Shopify.
Your existing agency could either see this a great opportunity to sell you again, or you don’t have deep enough pockets to sort you out properly.
Adding Lots of Products to an Online Store Can be a Lot of Work
How do you record your stock? If you use a good stock management or EPOS system then this can be really easy if you know how.
If it’s a small business and you use excel, you’ll need to modify your sheets to fit with your online store and on platforms that were not designed for ecommerce first, this could mean manual uploads. What’s needed is a proper ecommerce website plus a stock management tool. Working with a service partner is valuable here, you can dump all your data on them and have them clean it up and bulk upload to the online store.
Manually adding products is the last resort so if you’re doing that now, seek help from a pro because your time is money and you’re losing sales today!
Managing Stock is Really, Really Important!
If someone buys the last one but online customers are still able to buy regardless, your selling goods you can’t dispatch and that is the worst shopping experience ever. Totally unacceptable in this modern age.
When a buyer hit’s ‘confirm’ to pay for their item, they get that shot of shoppers delight. It’s done now and it’ll be here soon 🙂 If you then have to email them telling them it’s out of stock you’ve ruined the moment.
So if you have a large number of SKUs the website should be the main database and source of truth for stock levels. The place where they pay, should tell your stock keeping, not the other way around.
You Need to Sell Everywhere
The chances are that your customers shop on Amazon, Facebook, Ebay and Google Shopping far more often than directly on your website. But your niche store is better if they want to browse and get inspired.
If your existing website platform does not allow you to easily post your products on all platforms at once with a couple of clicks, you should seek advice and seriously consider switching to a dedicating ecommerce platform. In many cases switching to Shopify is faster and cheaper than struggling on with your old setup and then you’re setup ready for anything, the skies the limit.
For businesses going online during Covid-19, Shopify has setup a portal specifically to get trading fast. Click to get access.
