Creating An Ecommerce Store With Shopify + Others – Some YouTube Videos And Other Resources

websitetooltester.com is a very useful site has very positive reviews of Shopify and Weebly.

After reviewing the all information in this post, many entrepreneurs decide to use Shopify for their proof of concept store.

Shopify has created some free learning tools to help you get started.

Shopify has a number of useful blogs.

And here are the Shopify Pricing Plans. There are three plans to choose from: Basic Shopify – “All the basics for starting a new business”  ($29/month), Shopify – “Everything you need for a growing business” ($79/month), Advanced Shopify – “Advanced features for scaling your business”

websitetooltester.com review of Shopify is at Shopify Review: A solution for beginners or real pros? and of Weebly is at Weebly Online Store Review: An Easy Way to Sell?

Of the two, Shopify, they say, is the most complete solution but it is more expensive. The reviewers conclude:

[Please note that all the links in this series of quotes from websitetooltester.com are affiliate links and that site will receive a small commission (at no extra charge to the buyer). My site has no affiliate links.]

After having tested Shopify for a whole week, we have to admit that we are quite impressed. To compare it with small-scale online stores like Weebly or Squarespace almost seems unfair as they easily beat them in every single category – except price.

Adding products as well as setting up payment and shipping options works absolutely painlessly: no important service is missing. That makes both ordering and paying easy for your clients. Their layouts can be modified to a large degree without any programming knowledge.

But Shopify is not only an online store. You can also use it to do content marketing via a blog and also add content pages. And that’s what we find so fascinating: Shopify can be handled by an absolute beginner while at the same time providing a great looking, cutting-edge online store.

Of course, quality has its price. Shopify is not the cheapest solution, and even in their “Shopify” plan ($79/month) they charge you a 1% transaction fee. But you can bypass this fee by signing up for Shopify payments, which is their own payment gateway.

In their “Basic” plan ($29/month), they offer telephone support and the ability to modify your entire template. Find our full analysis of Shopify’s pricing plans here.

Our recommendation: before going “big,” consider picking the “Basic” plan ($29/month) if you need more features you can always upgrade. WordPress users can integrate Shopify Lite for only $9/month.

Here are some videos abut Shopify:

Shopify POS – iPad Point of Sale System (also available on Android now, I believe). YouTube Video from Shopify. For more info on Shopify POS see link here.

The video below by Webtegrity is very brief and very helpful. Kori, the author, recommends starting with Shopify and using that site as a proof of concept (that your store is viable) as it is much simpler to use than WooCommerce). Her advice makes sense to me – watch the video and see what you think:

WooCommerce vs. Shopify – Which one is better? YouTube video from Webtegrity (I really like her work.)

 

If you’re going to use Weebly, they recommend the Weebly Business Plan.

The Weebly Business Plan is $35 monthly. Or $300 a year. Both have automatic renewal.

Weebly’s Online Store can be tried out here. (Link will open in a new window.)

Check out Weebly Webinar: Build an Online Store on YouTube. 1:18:18. This is not particularly helpful.

See also Webinar: Beginner’s Guide to Weebly for basic instruction on how to use Weebly to just build a simple website.

Stripe is a way to accept credit cards and Webinar above says it is the easiest to set up.

Resources:

WooCommerce Review: Best eCommerce plugin for WordPress? 4:48, YouTube Video from WebsiteToolTester. Published on Dec 14, 2015.

WooCommerce Review – Should I host it with Bluehost? from websitetooltester.com.

Create Your Own Online Store – An In-Depth Guide for Beginners from websitetooltester.com

2. The Online Store System Requirements Checklist

Complexity and budget:

This is a fundamental decision. How much time and how what amount of resources are you willing to put into this project? We put the providers into three categories:

Complexity easy medium difficult
Time frame to completion  3-7 days 1-3 weeks Several weeks or even months
Budget (rough estimate) $7.50 to 30 per month ca. $15 to 200 per month Creation (single expense): $2,000 to $20,000; plus $20 to $350 per month
Hosting Included (Cloud) Included (Cloud) Installation on your own webstorage
Examples Weebly, Jimdo, Wix Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion Magento, PrestaShop, WooCommerce

There are some differences here: A simple shop like the one offered by Jimdo is easy to set up in no time. Anyone who knows their way around the Internet should be able to figure out how the interface works in just a few hours. Often times, a weekend is plenty sufficient to get an online store up and running. For a single-product store, you won’t need more than the Jimdo Pro plan for $7.50 per month.

The shop systems of medium complexity offer a much wider array of features. Integration and payment methods, however useful, require a steeper learning curve and a higher budget though. Unlike the simpler systems, these will allow you to manage much larger stores, and you have better marketing options, too (such as cross-selling, price search engines, etc.).

Some Other Shop Features You Might Find Useful:

Criterion Options
Which payment methods do you want to offer? PayPal
Credit card
Direct debit
Money transfer/money order
Invoice
Cash on delivery
Installment payments
Shipping options Interfaces with shipping companies such as DHL or UPS
Pricing according to regions and countries
Drop-shipping
Accounting options Create invoices or integrate with accounting software (such as Xero)
Different VAT rates
Automatic import and export of goods Manage large product portfolios too large for manual maintenance (e.g. more than 100 products)
Customer accounts Can customers sign up in order to speed up the checkout process?
Marketing features SEO (URL structure, etc.)
Cross-selling
Integration of price search engines
Coupons
Email marketing (newsletters and ‘abandoned shopping cart’ emails)
Blog feature for content marketing
Domain name / email addresses Are the domain name and email accounts included?
Internationalization How many languages and currencies are supported?
Security features SSL encryption
Automatic backups
Guaranteed website availability (SLA)
Support Email support
Telephone support
Live chat
Availability

Shopify Review: A solution for beginners or real pros? from WebsiteToolTester

Conclusion

After having tested Shopify for a whole week, we have to admit that we are quite impressed. To compare it with small-scale online stores like Weebly or Squarespace almost seems unfair as they easily beat them in every single category – except price.

Adding products as well as setting up payment and shipping options works absolutely painlessly: no important service is missing. That makes both ordering and paying easy for your clients. Their layouts can be modified to a large degree without any programming knowledge.

But Shopify is not only an online store. You can also use it to do content marketing via a blog and also add content pages. And that’s what we find so fascinating: Shopify can be handled by an absolute beginner while at the same time providing a great looking, cutting-edge online store.

Just in case you’re missing a function or want to change the layout, most of the time you are only one click away. New templates and apps can be installed with one simple click via their app store. If you should need a function that doesn’t exist, it’s possible to create it since Shopify has a powerful template language called “Liquid.”

No matter how fast your business and requirements grow, with Shopify you don’t have to be afraid of moving to another platform and restarting everything from scratch (unless you become another Amazon, that is).

Of course, quality has its price. Shopify is not the cheapest solution, and even in their “Shopify” plan ($79/month) they charge you a 1% transaction fee. But you can bypass this fee by signing up for Shopify payments, which is their own payment gateway.

In their “Basic” plan ($29/month), they offer telephone support and the ability to modify your entire template. Find our full analysis of Shopify’s pricing plans here.

Still looking for flaws in Shopify? We’ll give you one: you won’t be able to set up a multilingual store out of the gate. However, we found an app priced at (a relatively steep) $17.50 per month that can help you create a multilingual store.

If that’s not an issue for you, Shopify might be THE answer to all your ecommerce questions!

Weebly Online Store Review: An Easy Way to Sell? from WebsiteToolTester

Weebly provides a fantastic website builder that makes it easy to build a professional online presence. But that’s not all. Since ecommerce has become so important they’ve now enhanced the editor with many features that will help you sell online. No coding skills needed!

You can sell physical products for shipping, or even digital stuff like ebooks and MP3s. However, the range of features (e.g. gifts cards) depend on the plan.

The Starter and Pro plans provide a very limited version of the Weebly ecommerce solution where they charge an additional sales fee. The best solution for aspiring shop owners is probably the Business plan. It has all the features that you really need. Weebly’s ultimate solution is the Performance plan. It comes with an abandoned cart email engine and real-time shipping rate calculation.

Weebly has done great work here. Adding products and categories is simple and quick thanks to the well-structured backend. New articles can also be added by uploading a CSV Excel file, and you can even transfer articles directly from Shopify or Etsy. Artists and writers in particular will appreciate the capability of selling digital goods such as MP3s, videos, or ebooks.

We liked the fact that three payment providers found their way into Weebly’s online store: Stripe, Authorize.net, and PayPal. All of these services charge a 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee. In addition Weebly charges you an extra 3% transaction fee in their Starter and Pro plans. Choose the Business plan if you want to avoid this extra charge.

Buyers can benefit from a view optimized for mobile devices as well as the fact that all their potential shopping finds its way into a digital shopping cart. Security is worth a special mention of its own – all customer data is encrypted via SSL.

We have mixed feelings about the Performance plan. Even though it contains more features than Business, we don’t think that it’s worth almost the double price of the Business plan. If you are planning to have a store that large, you should probably consider Shopify as it offers a much wider variety of ecommerce add-ons.

Weebly has done great work here. Adding products and categories is simple and quick thanks to the well-structured backend. New articles can also be added by uploading a CSV Excel file, and you can even transfer articles directly from Shopify or Etsy. Artists and writers in particular will appreciate the capability of selling digital goods such as MP3s, videos, or ebooks.

We liked the fact that three payment providers found their way into Weebly’s online store: Stripe, Authorize.net, and PayPal. All of these services charge a 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee. In addition Weebly charges you an extra 3% transaction fee in their Starter and Pro plans. Choose the Business plan if you want to avoid this extra charge.

Buyers can benefit from a view optimized for mobile devices as well as the fact that all their potential shopping finds its way into a digital shopping cart. Security is worth a special mention of its own – all customer data is encrypted via SSL.

We have mixed feelings about the Performance plan. Even though it contains more features than Business, we don’t think that it’s worth almost the double price of the Business plan. If you are planning to have a store that large, you should probably consider Shopify as it offers a much wider variety of ecommerce add-ons.

All in all, Weebly’s online store is worth a look, and now finally plays in the same league as the rest of the website builder in terms of features and design.

 

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