How long does it take to set up a shop and sell online?
I’ve been asked this question several times in the last week. When you turn it around and ask the questioner how long they reckon it will take, the answer is usually several hours, if not days.
What if it took less than 30 minutes to set up your own shop and begin selling on line, wouldn’t you do it? Of course you would!
You design handmade jewelry, knit incredible garments, print custom T shirts or make amazing items of artwork and sell them to friends / family and through local independent shops.
No doubt your customers are delighted with your products and tell all their friends about you. But you are still only tapping into the tiniest proportion of your available market. Unless someone happens to know you / one of your friends or be in that independent shop, they have no chance of knowing about your product and thus making a purchase.
The answer (of course), is to sell online. However, several conversations in just the last week show that for many people the idea of setting up their own shop is a daunting one, and one they expect to be complex and problematical.
Let me let you into a secret. It isn’t! You could easily have a shop of your own up and running in around 30 minutes. Here’s how.
1. Assuming you have a website running WordPress, install the WooCommerce plug in. WooCommerce is part of the organisation that builds WordPress itself and it is the biggest (by a long way) e-commerce platform on WordPress. Not got a WordPress website – no problem. Just about every server can handle WordPress*, it is easy to set up a simple WordPress site, styled to look like your current website and put links to it from the relevant places in your main site.
2. Configure WooCommerce – set up your location, currency, whether it is a physical or downloadable product (e.g. an e book), customise any email confirmations you want the system to send.
3. Download the Payment Gateway plug in of your choice (PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, WorldPay etc) and configure your account.
4. Connect WooCommerce to your chosen payment gateway and link using the provided API key.
5. Create a product to sell in WooCommerce. Ideally with a product description, images, size / colour options etc.
6. Begin selling!
It is as simple as that. In 30 minutes or so, your reach will have gone from local to potentially global. What’s stopping you? You have a great product, why not sell it as widely as possible!
At QD Design we can assist you through the process. From simple advice and guidance, to setting up the WooCommerce platform and Payment Gateway or even building the complete WordPress site to contain it all.
We eat, sleep and breath the web and want to help businesses make the most out of it. Call us for a chat or drop us an email and we will get back to you.
*If your server really can’t support WordPress, we need to talk, urgently! You are being hosted on a device that may well be compromising your websites speed and thus your position in Google search results (Google hates slow sites and penalises them over faster ones).
Nick has web design experience spanning two centuries (well his first page was in 1998)! He is passionate about helping smaller businesses and new ventures make their mark on the web. As well as a web designer he has spent time as a management consultant and business coach and brings these skills to help customers excel. When not designing websites he is likely to be in the mountains be it skiing, climbing or just taking photos of awe inspiring scenery.