A mini shop store using Ecwid

 

Hi Everyone,

This is a long post so grab your coffee.

I just thought I would share a site with you called Ecwid

You can go to their site and get information and sign up if you are interested.

 http://open.ecwid.com/3mv3pd

Ecwid is a shopping cart integration that looks after everything so you can embed the code into any website and open your own shop. I used to use their services when I had a full website and it was fantastic. But, I wasn't maintaining my site and the costs of hosting, domain, and the shopping cart were not worth it for the amount of effort I was putting in to selling products. So I closed it, everything.

So what are the alternatives? Etsy, Bay and dozens of other micro shop setups including fb market place (which can be a nightmare). With these sites come the fees, fees, fees. On your listings, on the sale and on the payment, yeah even PayPal.

I currently sell on eBay again because I have many customers that know me through eBay and often eBayers are diehard customers that don't venture to other sites. But it is a constant love hate relationship I have with eBay and PayPal (another story).

So I set up a mini store on my blog that still points to eBay for the customers that want to make the sale there, and I accept direct payment for Canadian customers that I have found through facebook, in order to avoid the extra fees.(I love e transfer!)

The store I set up, I used my own coding skills (used to be my real job a long time ago) to showcase my items, but again it is time consuming to maintain and I gave up again I just put a link to ebay back on my page and said done.

But every time I see fees my stomach turns.

I went back to Ecwid and decided to use their services again. The nice thing about Ecwid is that they allow you to open a mini store with a max of 10 products no charge INDEFINITELY. Not just a trial.

You can set up everything from shipping, taxes, payment methods and more. You can create a product and embed it anywhere for an instance buy now posting. Like a blog post or a Facebook post etc. You can send your customers to an actual 1 page website where they can add to their shopping cart and check out. You can accept e transfers and PayPal pmts direct.

Now for those of you that have more than 10 products there is the next level where you would pay monthly. Then you can have up to 100 products. If you are a digital seller you can upload your digitals and sell the same way you do on other sites where the customer is directed to the download files. NO ADDITIONAL FEES

I set up a shop again and embedded it into my blog (it still isn't perfect), there is some tweaking to do, so you can check it out here on my blog (see tab above) or go direct to my mini website here: https://store333055.ecwid.com/

Yeah it doesn't have my name in the URL, but when you are linking it you can link your name and point to the site so it looks a little nicer. Personally I don't care about that stuff anymore for myself.

And if you want all the bells and whistles, you can buy a domain and buy a hosting package etc.

I will most likely go back to having 100 products with Ecwid which costs about 15USD a month or cheaper annually. There are many additional perks when you actually go up to a purchase plan. I will host my site on my blog and I will still use eBay for awhile yet.

Now if you go sign up, it might be a little daunting for you and maybe too much for you to get started. I can help you with that.

I would charge you a very small 1 time fee to get you going, while you learn the ropes or you can just ask me questions and I will answer you. If you need help with a full website set up, we can talk about that too.

Anyway, I thought I would share with you and you can decide for yourself. Go check it out, and if you need help, I am just a click away.