We've spent years sharing ‘how to' content with our readers and viewers. From kitchen DIY to adventures around the world, we've pretty much shared it all to help others get the most our of their experiences. Now, we're looking at BigCommerce as a way to set up an online store to share the essential and vital gear with the same people as well.
Why Set Up an Online Store
The choice to set up an online shop is both a simple and difficult one if you are going to start a business. Most business owners interested in an ecommerce website are most likely coming from a background of the brick and mortar. However, a number of small businesses are also turning to the ecommerce store model as it's both less expensive and now, with BigCommerce, it really streamlines the process.
For us, we never set out to sell any products and never really thought about potential customers. Our online business was pretty much set up to operate as a platform to share information with the communities we connected with. But, after realizing that our audience also has an interest in the actual products we regularly use, we wanted to be able to directly supply them with what we found works best or with what we planned on making ourselves.
How to Build An Online Store
We discovered that parenting out in the wild, and even homeschooling, was of great interest to a lot of people. Chelsea came up with some fantastic ideas about ways to tie both of those world together with a special leather bound journal she sourced and decided she wanted to sell. However, learning how to sell online adventure gear was extremely difficult at the time (over ten years ago).
Recently, a friend of ours brought up the idea of building an online store again after mentioning BigCommerce and their online sales capabilities. He pointed out that not only are they able to list products you want to sell to your customer base, but they even had built in search engine optimization capabilities to amplify the reach of any and all online businesses. He even pointed out that they could handle all the credit card transaction fee issues as well as international exchanges.
How to Sell Online For Free
If you are large business, medium family owned business, or even an online adventure writer or photographer like us with a story to tell and a desire to sell their products, there's good news. BigCommerse is offering a free trial to their services so you can get a peak at how this whole thing works and how easy it is to set up your online shop before worrying about a monthly fee.
How to Catch More Customers
To speak more to the capabilities of BigCommerce's abilities to help you sell any products you might want to sell to a larger market, there are a couple things to consider. You want to recognize how you are actually drawing in customer eyeballs. If you are already speaking to a large audience like us and want to capitalize on their already attentive eyes, BigCommerce actually provides the ability to natively sell products through social platforms like Instagram so you can maximize your product exposure with an already existing environment.
However, if you already have a great product(s) you want more people to know about, then BigCommerce has has a number of tools that will help spread the word about you and make the online sales experience a cleaner one for any potential customers that find you. A major part of this is the search engine optimization and the easy ready to go sales websites they provide for you to look as professional as possible. The great news is, you don't have to be a web development pro in order to get pro level results.
The Ability to Quickly Scale
The greatest part about being passionate about your own business is knowing that the effort you put in is going to pay off. This also means you are most likely going to need to be ready to scale your operation. Learning how to sell online is so simple with BigCommerce, you can figure everything out in less than an hour from watching this YouTube video by Mike over at Sentrel Media.
The Best Business Owner Hack
When it comes to getting ready to sell the hand full of products we have looked into bringing to our customer base in an online shop for ourselves, it has honestly been a huge load off our shoulders knowing that there is a cost effective service out there to bring it all together. There is a lot less for us to think about and getting started is so easy we don't really even need to slow down on our day to day work to get it done. Chelsea and I have worked in the social media, marketing and sales world for a collective 20 years and we've seen a number of things that make this the clear choice for building an online store.
A few years back, just before the world shut down, Chelsea and I took on a job to help a friend run the marketing for their outdoor and adventure products store. Their original website was antiquated and they were in the process of paying someone to build them a whole new “sales capable website” with SKUs, product inventories, as well as a number of other features that any serious business should have. However, after working for them for six whole months, and doing the best we could on our ‘marketing side', we never got a working ecommerce website to even build into.
This was because of common issues like developer delays, budget constraints, and a lack of support services that were easy to interface with. Whenever we had a change to make or a new need, it would be days before we would get a response from the developer. What was more, that response would turn into a week or more of “coding” or modifications which would then need to ALSO be reviewed and approved.
Create a Clean Business Experience
As a person hoping to operate a serious business, this would be an embarrassment and in truth, it was for them. It was a massive waste time and money on the side of marketing as well as all of our efforts were pretty much in vain as no one could make purchases through any of our work. I seriously believe that if they had simply known about or discovered BigCommerce, they would not have taken such large and wasteful financial losses in those two years they could have been growing.
The Best Option For Building an Online Store
There isn't much else I can really say to any of you who are considering getting into or improving your online sales abilities. If there's one thing we've learned over the years it's that being able to work from home and be the masters of your own time and schedule is a lot of work but also a door to a world of personal freedom. If online sales is part of something you are seriously considering to then check out BigCommerce because they are most likely the fastest, most efficient, and easiest way to sell your products to anyone in the world.
What types of products do you think you might want to sell?