Ready to build your online E-commerce Website store? There is a lot of conflicting advice out there. People will tell your different things and recommend different software. The right answer depends on what you are trying to accomplish, what you are selling, what your budget it, how much programming experience do you have if any, how many products you have to sell and what your marketing plan is.
The marketing plan is part of your decision making process because even if you build the most awesome store with the most amazing products, what is your plan on getting anyone to look at your store? If you think you can just make the store and people will just come to your site because your idea is just that awesome, you clearly have no experiences in sales or marketing.
The Wrong Tool for the Wrong Job
Free options when it comes to ecommerce will cost you in other ways, whether it is high fees, lack of control or headaches. Yes, you can sell on ebay or Amazon, but get ready for some competition selling at the fraction of your price.
A common idea is to just use free e-commerce plugins for WordPress to create an ecommerce online website like WP eCommerce. Yes this will work but it will become a headache if you plan to sell more than just a handful of products. WordPress is designed to be a blogging platform, not a full eCommerce platform. WordPress is great as a base for marketing.
What is the solution?
You can use WordPress for your company site and add a menu option in the top menu for "Store" which is an external link that goes to your eCommerce site. You can use a sub-domain which will link to your eCommerce website like store.yourdomain.com
Which software should you use for your online eCommerce website store?
Shopify is a great solution for people with little to know programming experience. You can easily drag and drop design the store and use their simple menus to add products with photos of the items you are selling.
Another advantage to Shopify, are its multiple integration options to sell directly on your Facebook page ( https://help.shopify.com/manual/sell-online/facebook-sales-channel )and be able to drop ship directly from Aliexpress (Learn more at https://www.shopify.com/blog/117607173-the-definitive-guide-to-dropshipping-with-aliexpress )
If you have programming experience, Magento is a great option to manage multiple products.
