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But for the most part, you'll need to build your own audience to make social network sales work. If you already have a wide follower base, selling products to that existing audience might be easy. Or, you can start from scratch, building your audience one person at a time with beautiful photos, witty posts, or silly videos. Real-world events—like a table at a farmer's market—can help people notice your brand, follow you on social networks, and eventually make a purchase.
Ads are another great option—and they're more affordable for small businesses on social networks than anywhere else. You can set a small Facebook Ads budget, target people who are following related brands or interests, and hopefully get them to follow your page. Then, over time, you can try to keep their interest with new posts and eventually get them to make a purchase. The best part about selling on social networks is that it's cheap. You can make a Facebook Page or Twitter profile and list your products for free right from your phone.
You don't need a separate website, and might not even need a payments tool or a full computer.
Create Your Own Online Store in a Weekend [Alannah Moore] on giuliettasprint.konfer.eu * FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The advantages of selling your products. Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Web designer Alannah Moore conducts website setup workshops in London and Paris, and specializes in advising.
You'll even keep your communications with customers right inside the chat apps you already use to talk with friends. The downside is, it's harder for customers to sort through all of your products, and can get overwhelming trying to manage all of your orders inside Messenger. What It'll Cost : Nothing—at least if you sell directly on a social network. You might need to pay for ads to get your products discovered, along with a 2. If you like having the more integrated feel of a real Facebook Store, then you might be ready for a more advanced eCommerce platform.
One that's designed just for selling stuff online, that includes exactly the features you want. It'd take a bit more work to run that store—you'd have both the promotion tasks a social store brings and the more strict listing requirements a marketplace asks for—but you'd have more control over the sales process and how your products are displayed.
Form builder apps are some of the most flexible tools—they can power anything from your contact form to a prototype of your next app. And, yes, they're a great way to start a simple store. All you need to sell stuff is your customer's name, info about the product they want, and their payment and shipping info.
A form's standard text fields are a simple way to gather most of that. Most form builders—such as Typeform and Wufoo—let you integrate with payment processors like Stripe and PayPal to accept payments inside your form. Remember : Never ask for payment information in a form without using the built-in payment tools, as you could easily be liable if credit card data were stolen or leaked from your form. You'll have to do the hard work of sharing your product page and convincing people to pay via a form, but it's an incredibly simple way to sell your new shirt design or eBook.
Here's what you'd need to do. One of the best parts of using a form to sell products is that you can customize the checkout process far more than you could in any other standard eCommerce app. That can let you be creative—but be sure to include fields for all the data you need, and make sure your form feels trustworthy with clear pricing info and official payment fields so your customers won't leave the form before paying. Be sure to check some example payment forms perhaps with these guides from Typeform or Wufoo.
Want something even simpler than a form—perhaps the simplest way to sell stuff online? A single-product store builder is the app for you. Tools like Gumroad and Plasso aren't just for selling single items—you could use them to sell as many products as you want. But they are focused on presenting only one item at a time. You'll make a listing page for each product, with its own pricing, description, and media.
Then, share that page, and your customers can buy that one item in a few clicks. In just about the time it'd take you to share a file on Dropbox, you could be selling that file. All you'd need to do is:. You can use payment pages like these for all types of purposes.
They're especially great for selling digital products such as eBooks and website themes, but you can also use them to sell anything you'd list on Etsy or even to make your own pre-order system for upcoming products. They can even run your subscription service or give you a way to add a store to your existing website without much work. They're not that flexible and you can't make them look like you want—but you'll be hard-pressed to find anything else that offers this kind of simplicity.
If anything, we have to find an excuse to go to a "real" store. You need to carefully evaluate things like loading speed, features, compatibility with different payment gateways, compatibility with your business structure, your web developer skills, SEO-friendly features, and more. Date: Oct 23, And as it grew, I did become more successful about them. His training is stuffed with hundreds of quality videos and step-by-step tutorials. Thanks very much. Giveaways have the added benefit of increasing your brand presence and product visibility.
What It'll Cost : Most single-product stores are priced like payment services, as a percentage of your selling price. If you need more customization for your online store than eBay and Etsy offer, odds are you'll end up with a hosted eCommerce app like Shopify or Big Cartel. They're the real deal —a full custom online store for your business. Tools like these are designed to handle every detail about your own store, one that looks exactly the way you want.
Your store will have its own site, complete with product listings and a shopping cart for customers to buy multiple products. When you login to your store's account, you'll see a list of orders you need to ship, and can dig into stats to see how many people visited your store and how much money you've made this month. And, since they're hosted , you won't have to do any work to maintain the site, install updates, or keep customer data secure. The team behind your eCommerce store will manage all that for you. You'll have all the advantages of having your own site, without most of the hassle you'd have in running a site on your own server—though you won't be able to change as much in your site as you could with a self-hosted eCommerce app which we'll look at next.
Want to market your store with blog posts, email newsletters, and social media? Wondering how you'll keep track of accounting data and manage returns? Hosted eCommerce apps will take care of all that and more. They'll take longer to set up than any of the other options so far—and cost more, at least up front—but you'll get a customized site for your efforts. Here are the basic things you'll do:. The important thing with hosted eCommerce apps is how much their interface fits your workflow and needs. Instead of directly opening an account and committing to one app right from the start, you might want to try a trial account on several apps and see which one you like best before building your full store.
What It'll Cost : Pricing for hosted stores varies based on your needs.
Tip: Want more details on each eCommerce platform—and other alternate apps? Skip ahead to chapter 5 for a deep-dive into each of the best eCommerce apps. If you're already running your own website or want to customize everything about your site, self-hosted eCommerce tools are the next best option.
They offer many of the same features you'd find in hosted eCommerce apps, and the core versions are free—though you'll need to pay for things like hosting, though.. Self-hosted eCommerce apps such as WooCommerce and Magento are some of the most popular ways to build a store since they let you customize everything.
You'll find a wide range of themes and plugins for each to make it simple to build the site you want. And because they're running on your own server, you can dig in and customize their code and database however you want. That same flexibility makes them more difficult to start using and maintain, though. You'll need to set up your own server or hosting, and the onus is on you to keep your customer data safe. And you'll often need to look further for add-ons with the exact features you want since the core apps themselves are a bit more streamlined.
Want to try out a self-hosted eCommerce app before committing to it? Or just something that we know we can flip? Hi I would like to quit my day job and work for my self, i want to know do you need physical stock before you can start selling it on your own website thanks Eric. Hello, Thank you so much for this site you have made my dream possible.
As a single mom of 7, this will open so many doors for me, I work 2 jobs and sell my products on the side. Thank You Again. Could you please reply Thanks Again. Nice post.
Whatsapp Quotes. This was a great tutorial.
I am definitely going to check your website for more videos. Thanks for the effort.
I am researching on how to start my own web shop. I find your video really interesting. That is so true that doing business online is not a big deal nowadays. I am wondering what should be terms and conditions for suppliers to sell on my website. And what should be standard selling fee. I will suggest you to get technical knowledge first, it will give you more profit rather you hurry in selling your website.
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