It’s no surprise that the eCommerce market has been booming as of late. After the dot-com crash of 2000, when many eCommerce companies disappeared entirely, new ones surfaced and eventually the industry began to see a steady upwards growth. By the end of 2007, eCommerce sales were accounting for 3.4 percent of total sales revenue in the US. But it didn’t stop there; skip forward to 2017, and retail eCommerce sales amount to 2.3 trillion worldwide.
Just a quick look at online giants like Amazon and eBay is enough to show consumers are purchasing goods through the Internet at record rates. In fact, you’ve probably bought something online yourself in the last couple of weeks. But it’s not just Internet retailers and megastores that are making a large profit off of online sales; smaller businesses have also found considerable success going into the online realm. Whether it’s selling a product, providing a service, or just advertising their brick-and-mortar facilities, small businesses can benefit immensely from having an online storefront–especially if they want to stand out from the competition.
Still, for many small businesses, taking the leap online doesn’t seem like the soundest decision. If your physical business is doing perfectly fine, why bother investing all that time and money in something that might not even pay off in the long run? After all, setting up a website is an undertaking that is not to be taken lightly. For starters, a website requires constant care and attention if you want to keep consumers engaged and stay up-to-date with current eCommerce trends. Furthermore, depending on how you build it, you might have to pay additional fees on top of your monthly payments for access to the eCommerce platform company. For many small business owners, the investment just isn’t worth it; they would much rather go with a traditional marketing campaign.
While businesses can still thrive solely through their brick and mortar locations, those that make the decision to establish themselves online see their profits increase more often than not. This is due to the changing landscape of retail in the US and other highly developed economies. Consumers are spending more time than ever online, which is causing ripples across the market and driving physical stores to gain a digital foothold in order to avoid losing revenue to online shopping gateways. Even for businesses that do not sell products or services online, having a website can instill trust in potential customers, many of whom consider an online presence as a sign of legitimacy.
Make no mistake, consumers still crave the ‘touch-and-feel’ aspect of retail and the human element of service providers with physical locations. But as technology improves, like it has with smartphones and highly compact, portable computers, it’s a given that consumers will want the advantage of both experiences. To this end, businesses have a few options they can consider for building a site online:
Building Your Website From Scratch
Building your business’ website from scratch will grant you the greatest amount of freedom when creating an online storefront. By starting from scratch with code, you can customize every inch of your website to be exactly as you’d like it. This is the ideal alternative for businesses that have specific needs, such as unique shopping carts or solutions that basic HTML templates can’t satisfy.
On the other hand, building a website this way requires solid knowledge of HTML, PHP, MySQL, and other programming languages. If those acronyms are enough to scare you, also keep in mind that different types of code have varying degrees of learning curve. If you lack the technological knowledge, you’ll be forced to pay someone else to build a website for you. Depending on the size of your business, the website might require a whole team of developers to work on it. This makes building a site from scratch a very expensive option, one that typically only larger companies will be able to afford. If you have experience in web development or are willing to invest plenty of money, then a from-the-ground-up approach could be the answer to your business’ needs. However, as developing a website like this is mostly a luxury, I would recommend businesses–especially smaller ones–to explore other eCommerce solutions.
Using WordPress + Plugins
WordPress is the world’s leading content-managing system (CMS), well known for its popularity with bloggers. WordPress can do a lot more than just blogs, however, thanks to a massive selection of templates and over 55,286 plugins. Some of those plugins, such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, provide WordPress users with a set of tools for creating and managing an online storefront. For any business that already uses a website created through WordPress, these plugins are a perfect match.
Just like website builders, no WordPress eCommerce plugin can do it all. Some are better suited for selling digital content, while others excel at selling and shipping physical goods. Moreover, eCommerce plugins are not equipped with a pre-existing template, which means users need to look for a WordPress template that they like and that is compatible with the plugin of their choice. Furthermore, WordPress requires users to have a web roster first in order to use the software itself. If you are interested in setting up an eCommerce site through WordPress, consider taking a look at our top 10 web hosting companies.
Paying For an eCommerce Website Builder
eCommerce website builders are essentially the same as any other kind of website builder. Customers gain access to templates, boxes and text fields that can be moved around said templates and evaluate consumer traffic on the website. You pay the company for the platform on a monthly or yearly basis and can choose from different levels that give you access to a wide variety of features. Instead of going to a web hosting company, the website builder’s cost includes that of hosting, for which they offer the usual bandwidth and storage. eCommerce website builders include all these features and more, all the while being geared for use as online storefronts.
eCommerce builders focus on doing three things: 1) constructing a webpage that is appealing while matching the products or services a user is selling in an easily-navigable fashion, 2) giving business-owners tools that can help understand consumer behavior and habits, and 3) providing ways of both obtaining new customers and securing purchases made by potential customers. To this end, eCommerce builders provide a greater number of marketing and analytic tools so businesses can increase their profits. Examples of these are sales channels like Facebook and Pinterest, customer segmentation, product reports, consumer discounts, and more. A lot more weight is placed on the selling aspect of your website, whereas regular website builders provide a more standard set of features and tools which are aimed at a general audience.
Another aspect that changes between regular and eCommerce website builders is the kind of templates they have available for users. Regular website builders need a greater number and wider variety of templates to be appealing for most consumers. eCommerce builders, on the other hand, provide a more limited number of templates, but they are also more specific. These are typically called “professional” templates because they are meticulously crafted specifically for the use of business-owners and other professionals looking to sell things. These templates are one of the biggest reasons businesses use website builders: they are intuitive, appealing to consumers online, and require no experience with code at all.
For the eCommerce needs of most businesses, especially small ones, eCommerce website builders are the way to go. Although these platforms sometimes pale in comparison to the flexibility that WordPress or building a site from scratch can bring, they are by far the easiest, fastest alternative for setting up an online storefront. Coding will always require a significant investment of time or money–or both. WordPress requires paying a web hosting company to host your website on their servers and buying a domain, plus the added hassle of finding a good theme for the plugin you choose. eCommerce platforms can get a website up in mere minutes while being considerably more affordable than both the aforementioned options. If the limitations of using a builder are too much, however, the other two alternatives are perfectly fine ways of setting up your online storefront. For now, though, how about taking a look at our top ten eCommerce website builders?