Best platform for a simple online shop

[EllieB]

Hi,

I need some advice on the easiest platform/cms to use for a non techy for a very simple eshop selling watercolor paintings.

I have some experience with Wordpress but I've been advised to use Shopify. I know it's a very generic question but I'd just like some impartial input if possible.

Thank you!

 

[Mr D]

I would suggest starting where you can find customers. perhaps etsy.

 

[fisicx]

What are you selling?
How many products?
Are there variants?
What’s your marketing strategy?

 

[Joe Tagg]

Hi Ellie,

Definitely agree that Etsy is a fantastic place to start. I did exactly the same thing with selling watercolour paintings. It's got a lot of great built-in features, particularly if you're considering offering customised options for paintings. Buyers can send you details of a potential custom order, and then you can reply with the various details/specifications/pricing etc. It's also really geared towards people looking for handmade art/crafts to buy.

Etsy does charge a listing fee, and takes a commission when you sell an item. If you link it to a PayPal account, they will normally take a % as well. There's also your postage/packing. I'm based in the UK, and offered free UK postage, and then c.£4 to everywhere else.

After fees, for a £20 sale, I'd normally take home approx £12-14 of that, so not too bad.

Perhaps after building up quite a bit of sales and online presence through those channels, it might be good to transition to your own site, with a purchase/checkout function. That way you'll be able to retain a larger amount of the overall sale value.

Equally, no harm in having other online eComm platforms running at the same time. Certainly Shopify would be good. Maybe Not On The High Street as well. You'd just need to track when an item sells on one platform, and unlist it off the others.

When you've got the shop up and running, send us some links - it'd be great to see your art!

Hope that helps,
Joe

 

[wayzgoose]

Depending how many products you want to add, try Freewebstore. You can have up to 30 totally free. Very easy to use and excellent support.

 

[antropy]

Wordpress is probably the most simple and easiest. Alex

 

[Paul Norman]

Although none of my stores have every used Wordpress, it is arguably the market leader in the market place where you are operating.

However, I could always advise talking to people with track record at online sales about the options. Avoid the responses that say 'My cousin used this and really its the only thing I have heard of, but I insist it is the best'.

There are many other factors to getting an online shop making money, too.

If you can afford it, talk to some established online specialists. If you cannot afford that, frankly I would do wordpress.

 

[Charles Rice]

Get your website created with GoDaddy.
I feel this is a great platform for creating a website for simple online business.

 

[fisicx]

Get your website created with GoDaddy.
I feel this is a great platform for creating a website for simple online business.

Really?

 

[Paul Norman]

Really?

This.

Every now and then, someone posts an amusing suggestion, like this one.

 

[antropy]

Get your website created with GoDaddy.
I feel this is a great platform for creating a website for simple online business.

Go Daddy? Are you serious? They are the Market Leaders in being the most shoddy! Alex

 

[Nico Albrecht]

Agree go daddy is really bad and right up there with yell.com

For your shop I think you have the wrong approach in regards what to use.

1. Ideally you want scaling as easy as possible and part of planning. 5 transaction or 5000 transaction a day a day a good solution should allow easy calling if you ever grow.
2. Ownership of the framework you use. I prefer open frameworks such as opencart, drupal and many good others and you have control over it and better cost predictions
3. Spotify can bump up their prices anytime and you have to accepted that and cant do anything. Also 0 control over such hosted solutions

Go with an open solution, initial cost will be higher but cost will be lower over the years.

 

[antropy]

3. Spotify can bump up their prices anytime and you have to accepted that and cant do anything. Also 0 control over such hosted solutions

Do you mean Shopify, instead of Spotify? Alex

 

[Nico Albrecht]

Do you mean Shopify, instead of Spotify? Alex

Shopify will do.

 

[Ray Breen]

The balance is between paying charges/commission and having a potentially bigger audience, or doing it yourself, and paying fewer charges, but having less exposure.

End of the day, it is better to have a sale(and increase the amount), and paying charges, than not having a sale at all.

my 2p

 

[Markmiller1]

Wordpress is the way to go, customisable, easy to use & configure & moreover you will get the full control over all the things.

 

[makeusvisible]

The platform is important, and your 100% correct to be thinking about it. however, I do think sometimes people are overly concerned about the platform, when the fundamental concern at this point should be a brand identify/website design and a marketing strategy.

The choice will come down to budget. If you have a decent budget, you may be in a position to get a website designed bespoke, from the ground up. Most likely £2k+ This is the ideal scenario, as you can literally work with a designer to create a custom experience for your audience, from blank canvas. That work can then be passed onto a coder who will build it into the CMS, eg Wordpress/Woo commerce. An agency will handle both the design and coding aspects for you.

A lesser budget will get you a template based website, where your chosen coder will likely be modifying an off-the-shelf template in order to fit your needs. Obviously the compromise is the site wont have as customised a user experience.

The other options are monthly hosted type options, such as Shopify. Much like using templates, the site wont usually be completely bespoke, it will be a modified template.

Rather than choosing your CMS, you might want to approach it by choosing the right developer, designer or agency who is going to create the site for you, who's designs you like, and achieve results. Then see which CMS they use and why, before making a decision if that is a CMS you are happy to work with.

Best of luck.

 

[Lucan Unlordly]

Hi,

I need some advice on the easiest platform/cms to use for a non techy for a very simple eshop selling watercolor paintings.

I have some experience with Wordpress but I've been advised to use Shopify. I know it's a very generic question but I'd just like some impartial input if possible.

Thank you!

What are your paintings of?

We are working with a local artist who is producing paintings on a particular theme and will at some stage be opening the opportunity up to others.

 

[Mr D]

Shopify and indeed godaddy appear to be popular.
Yes shopify can put their prices up, so can anyone else. Just easier some other places to move your business to some other company.
I have nothing against shopify, they appear to offer what some people want.

Just may not be the optimal solution for any particular business. Bit like Ford Focus is a nice car popular with some people, may not be the optimal vehicle for all car drivers.

 

[Liquidshop ecommerce]

Someone else mentioned Etsy.com, and I have to agree.

If you setup a Wordpress, or any other stand alone website, then you have just created a bunch of hassle you don't need at this stage. Etsy already attracts a lot of traffic of people wanting to buy arts and crafts. If you setup your own little website, you will then need to market it and try and get traffic to it, that's a lot of hassle and time which you're better spending creating art!

Depending on your current social outreach, Etsy is a very low cost 'toe in the water' to start selling your artwork. Once this gets traction then setting up a standalone website to support this makes more sense.

 

[AndrewJhnsn333]

There are so many ecommerce platforms you can choose from. I agree with fisicx, before launching your webstore you should answer several questions.

Shopify is great for beginners. It is easy to use and you can manage your store with no technical knowledge needed. However, when your Brand is growing, Shopify is no longer enough. Shopify has a monthly fee, don’t forget about it.

Woocommerce is a WordPress plugin for ecommerce. If you are familiar with this platform and have experience in managing wordpress website, woocommerce can be the right choice for you.

PrestaShop is a popular European platform. It is written in php and it is open source. So you don’t have to pay monthly to use it. There are also plenty of modules and themes at the PrestaShop official marketplace and it is easy to enrich your webstore functionality.

Magento is a great ecommerce platform that famous brands use. It is open-source and has multiple inbuilt features. But it is quite a complicated platform and you will need the help of php developers to launch a Magento online store.

The procedure of migration from one platform to another is time- and effort-consuming that’s why take your time and choose your ecommerce platform carefully.

 

[Elle Rish]

Shopify is one great platform especially if you don't want to get much into technical stuffs. But, if you want something like an Open Source Platform, WordPress is good to go. It is easy to learn, but takes time.

 

[EddyRock]

<removed> Try Shopify. No worry about webserver, domain name and web development. It's the most easy to use platform I've ever known.

 

[crackerjackcommerce]

I would agree with one of the first posts re: Etsy. If you are starting out and have no experience in web hosting, domain names, sitemaps, plugins, design, security, backups, online marketing etc... then IMHO it would be best to start with a well known suitable marketplace as they take care of the above whilst you can focus on getting experience with some fundamentals: listing a product for sale, order fulfillment, customer service, profit and loss etc.

It will be low barrier to entry and you should pickup much experience in a short time frame, especially this time of year as we near Christmas.

There are a few other good forum posts on here also re: what platform. From what I have read it tends to be Wordpress, Shopify or Magento.

Good luck with it all.

P.S. If you have a big budget then of course you can pay companies (developers,designer,agency) to handle the above and more and depending on your investment and profit margins this might suit you. I was thinking from more of a DIY point of view.

 

[TotalWebSolutions]

If you have experience with WordPress why not try WooCommerce? Alternatively, Freewebstore and ECWID are worth a look.

 

[David-Max]

I would recommend use Shopify or BigCommerce. Both don't require technical or programming skill
Shopify
With its user-friendly interface, anyone using Shopify can set the shop up in a basic way within one to two days. From then on, it can take a little while to figure out adding products and images, setting the layout, etc. However, it is still quite a fast process.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce has some of the most powerful tools in the eCommerce market. However, this also means that it will take a much longer time with a lot more effort to get used to them.
I do recommend BigCommerce for anyone who is serious about developing a huge online business, though.

 

[ukbf0001]

Been there seen that with woocommerce and shopify and came off them pretty quickly.
I only use 2 ecommerce platforms these days - and the main is ecwid - there used to be the saying you cant be in 2 places at once - with ecwid - that is totally not the case. Set it is very easy , using wordpress is even easier.

BUT then you are given 5 or so lines of html code. Copy that into any website / webpage and your fully functioning shop will appear.
And the killer bit is - it integrates directly into facebook - so facebook users never have to leave their facebook session. Which is probably why ecwid is the top ecommerce app on facebook.

Absolute no brainer - and it's free for 10 products , it is then something like £10 a month.
That covers the hosting, the security, he upgrades, new features, new payment gateways - compare that to hosting it yourself, you look after the upgrades, the security patches. In one of my niches - facebook ads work extremely well.

 

[Karol B]

If you have WordPress experience then woocommerce Would be the first choice.

 

[GreyRunner86]

Woocommerce and Shopify have always been great for me.

 

[Robin @ SH&P]

My advice would be to go with Shopify if you want peace of mind.

Wordpress has the benefit of being free, but it is open source software and is always going to be prone to security issues. You will find that you will be constantly updating both Wordpress and all the plugins you use and you will need to be careful that none of the plugins break your site (Google "Wordpress white screen of death")

As well as that, Wordpress has next to no support and you are every much on your own. I have run stores on Wordpress and Shopify and there is absolutely no contest. Wordpress is hard work and high maintenance. You get what you pay for.

Another feather in Shopify's cap is that it adheres to all PCI compliance issues for taking payments online from other people. These rules have got very tight in the last few years and you have to be very, very careful when you are accessing and storing card and payment details from customers. If those details are stolen by a hacker (and believe me they are everywhere) then you could be in trouble. With Shopify all the security issues are taken care of and you don't have anywhere near the same liability.

Wordpress is great for blogs, journalling and affiliate sites etc. but I personally (and speaking from bitter experience) wouldn't touch it with a barge pole if you are wanting to use it for an online store.

Shopify at under £30 a month is worth every penny. Every business needs at least some kind of investment, however little, and that is my recommendation hands-down.

 

[fisicx]

Wordpress has the benefit of being free, but it is open source software and is always going to be prone to security issues.

Oprn source =/= security issues.

Linux is opensource as is anything you can find on github and other repositories.

You will find that you will be constantly updating both Wordpress and all the plugins you use and you will need to be careful that none of the plugins break your site (Google "Wordpress white screen of death")

It takes a few minutes once a week to do a bit of site maintenance. I've never had a white screen of death.

As well as that, Wordpress has next to no support and you are every much on your own.

Rubbish. There is a huge support network.

Wordpress is hard work and high maintenance.

Only if you make it so. Most sites run just fine with just some regular updating.

Another feather in Shopify's cap is that it adheres to all PCI compliance issues for taking payments online from other people.

Wordpress doesn't need to comply. The payment gateway you choose needs to comply but that's not the same thing.

If you prefer Shopify to Woocommerce that's fine. But some of your comments about Wordpress weren't quite correct.

Note Wordpress is not an ecommerce platform. You can install a theme or a plugin that provides the ecommerce functionality.

 

[Dillon Lawrence Ltd]

Another feather in Shopify's cap is that it adheres to all PCI compliance issues for taking payments online from other people. These rules have got very tight in the last few years and you have to be very, very careful when you are accessing and storing card and payment details from customers. If those details are stolen by a hacker (and believe me they are everywhere) then you could be in trouble. With Shopify all the security issues are taken care of and you don't have anywhere near the same liability.

That's very much a hosting issue as opposed to a WordPress specific one. Of course whatever CMS you're running should be patched/maintained from a security perspective but I've seen Magento and OpenCart all hosted on non PCI-compliant environments prior to migrating them to me so it's certainly not WordPress specific.

With the right host, WP can be made PCI compliant to the level required. Same goes for the security of WordPress itself. A good managed host will be proactive in taking care of this for you. We employ a vulnerability scanner across our client sites so vulnerabilities are patched manually, without needing to even update WordPress (although clients who insist on not updating due to legacy plugins feel the wrath of our warning emails).

Essentially, it's not a WordPress issue. It's down to how proactive/good your host is. And of course what you're willing to pay = quality of service.

As for Shopify, we're a partner. Most of your customers (when a site is done right) will never know what platform lies underneath. Shopify are a solid platform that's come a long way. We build WooCommerce stores and Shopify stores. The big difference being flexibility in what can be done. With flexibility however comes risk which again is where you need someone who knows what they're doing/a good managed host who will do the heavy lifting for hosting WooCommerce, just as Shopify do behind the scenes when you're using theirs to host your store.


Anyway I'm rambling...

 

[TonyJJ]

If you're after short-term results, selling on eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Depop should suffice.

But if you're after a long-term solution, definitely set up a store on Shopify.

 

[ystong]

I am just think that Amazon isn't the best one?

 

[fisicx]

I am just think that Amazon isn't the best one?

Depends on what you are selling and to whom. It’s a lot better than sellers who pretend to be from the UK but ship from China.

 

[Karimbo]

Wordpress is probably the most simple and easiest. Alex

I wouldn't recommend it. For an ecommerce site, use an ecommerce script dedicated for it. Wordpress has serious issues, it updates every week it seems and themes/plugins stop being updated and every so often you have to reconfigure your entire site with updated plugins or themes.

I paid money for various themes and plugins with "lifetime support". The thing is lifetime support is only worthwhile if they're still selling the plugin or theme so it's in their interest to keep working on it. When sales dry up and they've saturated their audience. They have no incentive to work on it. They let it lapse and then one day it's no longer compatible with the latest version of wordpress.

My advice is to use a CMS that is lightweight and as "stock" as possible. Especially for ecommerce where you simply cannot afford the site to break functionality.

Use self hosted opencart, magento or third party sites like etsy or shopify. Keep it as stock as possible to reduce your headache.

 

[CraigJohnsonUK]

I'd recommend building your ecommerce business in three phases:

1. Launch stores in Amazon and Ebay: Benefit from the ready made audiences in Ebay and Amazon to establish a revenue stream and build a consistent brand across these platforms whilst securing your IP (social logins and domains) for future expansion. Build a one page HTML / WordPress site to establish your brand in Google.

2. Launch on Shopify: Once you have money coming in, and happy customers, replace the one page site with a fully feldged Shopify store. Retine the Amazon and Ebay stores and build a great reputation and SEO for your own site.

3. Launch a bespoke store: Once the three channels are established above it may be worth considering a more complex solution.

 

[TonyJJ]

Setting up a Shopify would be beneficial in the long-run. Especially if you want to build an email list using their plugins. You could retarget these customers for free and display your new products to them.

 

[Dillon Lawrence Ltd]

Setting up a Shopify would be beneficial in the long-run. Especially if you want to build an email list using their plugins. You could retarget these customers for free and display your new products to them.

While I agree Shopify is a good way forward and a pretty solid platform for building your store on, you can add an email sign-up form to any site...

 

[Ecommerce-Help]

I've used many of the platforms and always return to Opencart. For a simple site that can be set up and developed on a small budget try the old but very usable 1.5.6.4 line. There are loads of free extensions for it and with one file change it can work on PHP 7.