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How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

I'm finally going to take the plunge and get a separate income stream, outside of eBay and Amazon going. I'm going to start selling my products on my own website.

I don't want to do any virtual items, or eBooks, memberships, or any of that other stuff. Just simple, physical goods I'm already selling on eBay. I want to sell them on my own website using a simple, cheap (or free!) shopping cart manager, use PayPal, Google Wallet, and Amazon Payments as the payment processors, and get traffic via Google Shopping.

I know there are several members here who successfully sell their products on their own sites already. I'm looking for recommendations on the following:

-What shopping cart should I use?
-What hosting service/plan should I get?
-How do I integrate items into Google Shopping?
-How do I get website reviews to show up on Google Shopping? I know there are reviews sites for independent websites. Recommendations?

The simpler, the better. Free is great if it's quality, but I definitely don't mind spending money to make money. I just don't want to blow a lot before I really know what I'm doing.

Looking forward to hearing from the heavy hitters, such as Jeff Weico and the others. Don't be afraid to dumb it down, this is a completely new arena for me!

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

Shopify and Volusion are some of the better known and easier to use. I tried shopify and it was easy to learn and set up but I just never got the traffic needed. I tried one of those free ones, I can't remember which one it was now, but the "free" version actually would have costed more in the long run, basically in order to actually make a decent useable and searchable site you had to buy features.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

While I don't have direct experience, I will just add that a friend of mine uses Volusion for their business and sold $300K worth of products last year without any complaints.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

I want to do this too. I was thinking about trying wix.com. They have some pretty nice pre-made designs and you can add paypal shopping cart, etc. to process payments.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

I can't recommend Shopify enough. I have used them for my website for almost 4 years now and the are fantastic. They provide 24/7 customer service and the 'shopify guru's' are all very helpful if you ever have difficulty with anything. All the website templates also have designers who will actually help you free of charge if you need help changing/fixing parts of the website design. Shopify has an 'apps' section with thousands of different apps to help make it easier to sell and it even has an amazon/ebay integration option to save you the time of manually adding products. There is honestly nothing I can say thats bad about it, I tried around 3 or 4 different website hosts which were nowhere near as good. It also gives you the option to accept payments in hundreds of different ways, I currently accept payments through Paypal and shopify payments which is powered by stripe and goes directly to my bank account. Not to mention its very affordable too and has different options depending on what you want to spend on your website.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

I second everything that was said. I have a Shopify account and it's so user friendly and the support is awesome! Haven't gone live just yet, but wondering about the traffic issues as well. I'm going to post alot on Pinterest with PinningNinja and see if that generates the traffic I need.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

another for shopify recommendation, nothing but good thing to say about their stores... ease of use, helpful dedicated support team + forums... and they have their own payment processor for credit cards where you don't need a merchant account, and rates are the same as pp.

$30 a month to start, then they have a huge app store where most are based on a monthly payment as well so to get fancy modules for your store expect to be paying more.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

Great! Like I said---I have NO problems spending money on software, I just don't want to spend it on something subpar.

Shopify sounds like a solid bet. Thanks for that.

Now, I know from experience using other smaller websites (not eBay or Amazon) that Google Shopping can drive a fair amount of traffic.

Does Shopify automatically upload my inventory to Google Shopping? Do I need to buy Google Adwords? How does it work?

Google Shopping, for those with traffic concerns, is FANTASTIC, as long as you price competitively. In fact, sometimes you can actually sell for more than eBay, price wise. I just don't know how to do it on my own site.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

You need an app for that but yeah, can definitely do that:

https://apps.shopify.com/search/quer...oogle+shopping

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

Holy crap....

Some of those are free, some cost hundreds of dollars a month.

Anyone use Google Shopping with Shopify?

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

So many selections to work with - wow.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

Probably need to do some research to see how many of those promo services are complete BS.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

Yeah, I just don't want to reinvent the wheel. I'm hoping some members with experience driving traffic to their own sites will chime in.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

Be wary of google adwords

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

shopify is decent, I don't like using sites like that as they can just decide to put up their fees whenever they like. The website isn't really yours as you'll always need to stay with shopify to keep it working.
Better off using wordpress+woocommerce which is free and you can search for hosting coupons, godaddy have 1$ a month hosting with free domain.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

If you wanted open source software you upload and have complete control, I'd go with opencart... free, and they also have an apps marketplace (one time fees, no monthly sub)... no direct support, all support comes from other members... you have to supply all payment processors.

It's probably the better option if you're up to manage all aspects of running the back-end of a webstore.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

Shopify is pretty solid but it can be pricey.

If you want to do it yourself, Wordpress + WooCommerce is nice and very flexible.

If you're a total noob to things then Shopify is where I suggest you start.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

They guru has spoken shopify it is.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

I would LOVE to "own" everything, but I'm pretty newbie. I mean, I once had a pretty sweet Myspace page with custom HTML, but that was quite a few years back.... :lol:

In all seriousness though, I'm looking for "websites for dummies". My main thing is: Supports PayPal, Google Wallet, And Amazon Payments with a pretty shopping cart (attractive, professional design to the site, easy for customers to use, etc) and Google Shopping integration. I want something I can't mess up. Free is great, but if it costs you sales, it's not worth it IMHO.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

Create really simple to use website. Choose your template, add your products and choose your payment processor. No coding is required and you can have a decent website up and running in a few hours

Costs about £9 a month to start with.

I dont see them having any issues taking US customers

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

I believe shopify has a free 30 day trial so you could try it out for a month and if you decide its not for you then at least you haven't paid anything. Its definitely good for newbies too! I'm sure when I originally signed up for shopify I had my website up and running within the same day.

Re: How to sell on your own website with a checkout cart
 

I will try them and see