How to Sell Online

As a small business, how might you take your products online to reach more customers? In this Blog Post, I'll tell you a bit about what we do, why we do it this way and some of the other options out there. 

All businesses are different. During the day, I work at a small local children's consignment shop. We post some items on Instagram and Facebook as well as do virtual shopping with people. For us, an online store would not work. On the flip side, I help manage and run Trouble Free Keys with my husband and our sales are 100% online. You may fall into either of these extremes, or you may be able to offer products at a storefront as well as online. 

When we purchased our 100% online business, our products were only listed on Ebay. The sales were decent, but it's tough to sell there, control the quality of customer service, impossible to talk to Ebay to work out any disputes, and the fees are quite high. We still have a strong Ebay presence, but have been working hard to move business to our own website. But how do you get a website where you can sell your items?

There are many options out there that make it easy to create a site and sell. We looked into several and ended up with Shopify. By having our own site, we liked that we can have control over how we list our items, add discounts, coupon codes, and offer large order discounts through custom ordering. The biggest advantages were less fees and more customer contact. Our goal is always great service, as I am sure yours it. To have great service we need to be able to talk to our customers. Shopify encourages a more personal relationship if an order needs more attention instead of having to go through an unresponsive, automated third party. 

With Shopify you can choose a template, add the features that you need, and start right away. You can even add a feature to connect your in store inventory to their point of sale feature to maintain sales and inventory together online and in a storefront. Here at Trouble Free Keys we don't have a storefront so we only use the online purchase feature. The fees are about 10% of sales so for our small business with lower sales, it works well and is less expensive than going through another system. The templates are clean and easy to fill in. I use a website called Canva (www.canva.com) to create art to add to the website, Facebook, Instagram, and these Blog posts. Canva has a huge amount of free features and even more if you purchase their membership. 

So, why Shopify? 

We looked into others. Wix is a popular one. The tools and features to make a website yourself on Wix are a bit more customizable, but there were not even features for the online store to meet what we wanted. Magento is another but it was more than we needed. Bit Commerce was similar to Shopify. In the end, we just had heard of Shopify and it met the needs of our small business at this time. Shopify is easy to add various apps to that you might need to customize your business. We added an app that made it easy to post from Shopify directly to the Google shopping platform so our products will come up in a user Google search. 

As our business (hopefully) grows, Shopify will serve us well. Tools like this are "hosted" tools. What this means is that Shopify hosts your site and all of the features. To do this, they take a bigger percentage of sales than if you had a "non-hosted," site. A non-hosted site is one where you can hire a web developer to create a site for you and implement all of the features you need by custom designing and programming the site to meet your needs. You may have read one of our newsletters or earlier blogs where we talk about our family. Jesper and I (Michelle) are married and run this business.

Jesper is a full time web developer and creates and maintains websites through his company (www.runengine.com), but yet we have a Shopify site? Yep! The reason is because Trouble Free Keys is a very small business so Shopify offers everything we need right now. For a larger volume of sales we would probably have a site built. Shopify is easy to use and maintain and I (Michelle) can do it too! But if you do need a great website, shoot my husband a message and he is happy to talk to you about that!

Selling online can be a bit daunting at first, but it really isn't. There are great tools out there to guide you and take your business to the next step.