Anyone else got a website?

[MrSam]

Hi folks,

I'm curious if anyone else here has their own website for selling?

We set up our own online store last year after deciding to put a bit more energy into the business, and it's been a really interesting ride.
I'm naturally interested in web development and marketing etc, so my thinking had been it was a worthwhile investment in my own learning if nothing else, though I was confident it would be worthwhile from a business perspective too.

Obviously we've gone from spending money on fees to spending it on advertising and marketing, but it's been fairly worthwhile so far - at least in our local experience in New Zealand. 

Would love to know if others have also been on this journey, and how you've found it. I'm sure there's lots of wisdom to be learnt from each other!

 

[lodibricks]

I originally had a WordPress site with plugins for eCommerce. The important thing that was lacking was syncing inventory with eBay and Facebook Shop (& Marketplace) as I had to manually manage both to not sell the same set twice. I don't sell enough for that to have happened yet. 😛
It seems any decent plugin now is nearly the same cost as full-blown site/services like Shopify & BigCommerce, so I signed up with BigCommerce. I've done little effort and zero marketing so far, so it's no surprise I've had hardly any sales on the site itself, but BigCommerce will sync with Facebook/eBay/Amazon/Walmart/itself/etc. The syncing has its quirks and isn't as instantaneous as I'd hoped. If Shopify also syncs with eBay & Facebook well (and no additional charges), I'm curious how that experience is.

It's hard to get traffic and trust on a site of your own compared to millions already shopping on eBay/Amazon, so it's good to hear your advertising has been paying off.

[MrSam]

Yeah you're right that integration is key if you're multi-platform. Although we're now doing 90%+ of our volume through our own site now, it does hook in to Facebook and our NZ auction site (much better than ebay thankfully). Thank goodneess I'm passed the days of using excel for inventory, that got pretty dodgy after a while!

There are good integrations for shopify/ebay, but I didn't look into them since that's not my market. 

There's also the requirement of having a critical mass / range of stock for people to take your store seriously. But once you reach that point, it seems worthwhile.

From my experience, offering click and collect and having reviews across google / facebook etc certainly helps build brand trust.