Small business website

[getrichplease]

Could any small business owners give me some advice please. I am trying to set up a business and (amongst other things!!) i'm confused about how best to set up a website to sell things online. Could anyone point me to a good platform they've used? I'm hoping not to commit to a large monthly cost (as I have no idea if i'll make any money doing this yet!)
Thank you

I use Wix for my website. You can set it up and play around with it for as long as you want, so it's great while you learn what you're doing.

However, in order to take payments you will need to sign up to one of their payment plans, which are not a massive amount, and they often have percentage off sales - but you will need to pay something.

Are your products something you've made, or are you buying wholesale and selling on? For handmade, there's Etsy and Amazon Handmade, or for non-handmade, Ebay and Amazon. It might be better to test your market via an established platform which has its own traffic, rather than jumping straight to your own website. How much do you know about SEO, and how are you planning to drive traffic to your site?

Honestly, I would start on an online marketplace rather than setting up your own website. If you are not sure if your products/s will even sell, this is the best and cheapest way to test the market.

be aware that an online marketplace aggregates all those who sell similar products and then when a search is made us their algorithms to decide who to show - often based on numbers of transactions etc.

So by using a platform like Etsy you are putting your products directly alongside your competitors - or put it another way, Etsy will also be encouraging your (potential) clients to buy from your competitors rather than from you... to the extent that even when looking at your product your competitors will be advertised alongside you...

The market places are also taking a considerable % cut of any transaction, so it can now be hard to make money on these platforms...

the market places can be useful (alongside ebay / Amazon / etc.) as a marketing exercise, but you want as much as possible to drive the customer to your own space for re-sales etc. This means having your own website

Wix is very poor as a technological solution - unless it can do everything you need now and into the future avoid it like the plague - square space is a bit better - wordpress with something like wooCommerce a bit better, but the best option is to use the cloud solutions focussed on this need - probably the main one currently is shopify...

yes, there is a cost to do this, but there are costs to set up a business - don't spend money until you have a strong business plan in place, but once you have, crack on...

Really depends what stage your business is at.

Brand new and you don't have a customer base yet I'd do etsy.

Have some customer base and want to sell through your own site I'd do Squarespace with the commerce plan.

Have a decent customer base and want to grow I'd use Shopify

I am doing just this too. I’ve begun to build a Wordpress site through Hostinger , I’ve bought a book and am work my way slowly through it, it’s complicated no matter what they say but doable. Good luck

I use Wix for my online shop. It's done the job but to be honest, it's so difficult trying to drive traffic to my site. Also given how many hours I've spent building and editing my site, I wish I'd gone straight to a professional.

I do sell on Etsy too and this was doing really well until around January, then for some reason it's died a death. You're completely in Etsy's hands so if they decide not to promote your shop, you're not getting any orders.

What sort of product?
To what target customer?

I speak/work with small business owners that use Etsy, their own custom websites, Amazon, etc. and it's all down to what they're wanting to sell and to whom. And details such as whether they also want a fulfilment service as part of that.

I use Ionos and have found it's the only one I could get my head round. I think it's six months free and £30 thereafter.

Squarespace integrated with Shopify. Have a hardcore marketing plan to direct traffic and lots of patience.

(Lots of sellers out there regret putting hours into platforms such as Etsy and relying on their internal traffic only for the platform to change their algorithms and undo all their work. You can also have your store deleted forever at the drop of a hat.)

If you’re selling 100% shopify is the best option.
Disagree with users suggesting etsy, its over saturated now and very difficult to grow a business on there. Own website is far better, advertise on local groups and instagram initially to get people there.

It depends very much what you're trying to sell. I'm a copywriter and spend £17 a month on Squarespace. I like the design but it‘s a learning curve! You can also sell physical products on Squarespace and connect it with others like Shopify. I’d look at the cost but also how easy it will be for you to manage it- for example WordPress is very popular but also difficult to manage and edit yourself.

I use shopify, it's cheap and easy to learn and if you do a simple html course online, and use many of the free tools that help with html, you can quickly customise your site. In the past I have created a website with live links to my supplier catalogs and listed over 80,000 products with minimal effort on shopify. It's a very dynamic space to work from. Like most things, you just need to learn the basics and take it from there.

I came across this discussion, and even though it’s a bit old, I thought I’d add something that might help. For a small business looking to promote itself online, having a strong presence on Google is really important. I found this great guide about medical SEO that clearly explains how to boost your website’s visibility without high costs. Even though it’s focused on the medical field, many of the tips apply to any small business wanting to be found online.

Just saying thanks for posting! Very useful thread ! Good luck with it all