e-Why, What & How · 2019-07-10

5 popular platforms to sell products Online – e-Why, What & How

how to sell online

Mediamodifier / Pixabay

Selling Online is a dream for many, but most people have very little knowledge of the components required to get running an Online store. In order to decipher the mystery we’ll take a look at a few of the most popular systems available for would be e-commerce entrepreneurs. So here’s how to sell Online.

  1. Shopify

Priced from $29 with a free 14 day trial.

Charges commission on sales.

No technical knowledge required.

100+ free themes on offer.

A platform which includes hosting in its package, Shopify is a popular all-in-one CMS for building an Online store. Everything you need is available immediately,  & they offer clear, easy-to-understand instructions for setting up.

Advantages, also include excellent sales reporting, priceless client support(with quick response), built-in scalable packages which accommodate growth.

  1. Wix

Priced from $17 with a free trial.

No commission on sales.

No technical knowledge required.

Approximately 60 free themes on offer.

A relatively new player in this field, Wix has applied its Website builder to the task of Online store creation. Everything you need is available immediately,  & includes sizable vouchers for advertising, analytics  & performance applications to assist you in obtaining the best results from your store. The interface is clean  & easy to understand  & offers excellent sales reporting features as well as dedicated customer support.

  1. BigCommerce

Priced from $29.95 with a free 15 day trial.

No transaction fees(commission is charged by payment gateways).

Some technical knowledge required.

10+ free themes (many other free themes available Online)

BigCommerce is the leader in the field of headless eCommerce solutions.(dedicated backend CMS, which can be integrated into a number of platforms as a single management interface). However, it also provides “standard” Online stores with a traditional ‘head’ or frontend.

Some technical knowledge is preferred for this CMS, since the documentation  & instructions are more technical in nature.

The BigCommerce platform offers an out-of-the-box solution, so you don’t need separate hosting services.(as with Shopify  & Wix).

  1. Woocommerce

Free open source plugin for WordPress (limited functionality without paid extensions).

No transaction fees(commission is charged by payment gateways).

Intermediate technical knowledge required.

1000+ free themes available.

WP is one of the most popular CMS systems for launching  & maintaining websites in the world at present(market share is 59.9%), so it follows that its most used e-commerce plugin, Woocommerce, is equally trendy.

Both, WP  & Woocommerce are free to set up, but you require a PHP compliant web host to run the system.

All Online stores need an SSL certificate, so you will need to find hosting that either offers this option as a feature, or buy your own certificate(Lets encrypt offers a free, easy to integrate SSL for most traditional servers, but it does not work well with Windows browsers).

Woocommerce offers a host of paid extensions  & many WordPress plugins(free  & paid are compliant with the plugin). Woocommerce offers, sales reporting  & customer support—this is a free plugin so expect somewhat delayed assistance, but they do offer an excellent forum where experienced users will, very often, assist you immediately.

  1. Instagram

The social media giant recently launched a ‘shopping’ option for users to employ as a method of selling products directly on the platform, without the need of owning or running a separate Website.

This new feature can be used by any Enterprise, which has a Facebook business profile(Facebook Page). Users need to gain approval to sell their products on the platform, but once ratified, sellers have a market of potential buyers numbering in the billions, rather than millions. This new feature, which is sure to be readily adopted by millions of businesses around the world, could bring a disruptive change to the world of Online eecommerce CMS as we know it now.


 

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