If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Selling products online — how hard can it be? After all, quite nearly literally EVERYONE ON EARTH is doing it and there are approximately 438 kajillion shopping carts out there to use. But here’s the problem with abundance; It’s confusing! So many options makes finding exactly the right solution for you complex at best. Googling “online ecommerce solutions” will get you 4,610,00 results – varying in cost and complexity from free to hundreds of dollars per month. So where do you start?

Our favorite solution has the following adjectives: Open Source. Simple. Affordable. Fast. All good things, in our estimation!

Things you will need to get your store online:

• Paypal account — Free. There are different levels of accounts, but the free account works for this solution.
• WordPress content management system and site template — Free
• WordPress E-commerce Plugin – Free. We’ll give more info on this below.
• Web Hosting (We selflessly recommend Taproot Green Web Hosting) — 7.95/month and worth every penny – One click wordpress installs and we will help you when you get stuck!
• Images of your goods — Free if you have a digital camera/phone or friend with one
• Domain name – 9.00-11.00/year (you can register throughTaproot Green Web Hosting )

Total cost to get started, roughly 16.95.

If you are not familiar with WordPress checkout WordPress.org. WordPress is basically a content management system for your site. It was originally developed for bloggers but it has quickly proven far more flexible than folks would imagine, and an invaluable solution for people who needed a great looking site that they can update themselves. And, being that it’s open source, there are myriad helpful plugins to add functionality to your site, like calendars, blogs, email lists, photo galleries, and yes, online stores!

Create Your Store!

From this point in the article forward, we’re going to proceed as if you have already installed and are using WordPress :) If you need help getting to this point, don’t hesitate to ask! Contact us here.

Step 1: Create the Cash Register

First things first — You need a way to process credit cards. Paypal.com is the answer here. Unless you’re already set up to sell thousands of dollars worth of merchandise each month, a true merchant account is not cost-effective, either from the monthly standpoint, or from the complexity of the initial set-up. Paypal is a simple solution that does the work for you, with minimal fees, and it’s common enough that most folks who do shopping online have already engaged with, and trust them.

 

To create your free paypal account that will allow you to send and receive payments online, you will need a credit or debit card and a real bank account. This is to verify that you are real and gives paypal a place to transfer the funds to when you sell something online. So go set that up, and come back when you’re ready. ;)

Step 2: Set Up your Cart!

Ok, so now you have an account to deposit the online riches into. Next you need to add a plugin to wordpress to manage your items. This plugin is the answer. We’d write up how to set it up, but someone there made a great video of each step and well you can’t beat that.

 

There are some sample of what the store looks like here and also check out GreenLemonaide.com who we recently setup with the store.

Step 3: Add Products and Sell!

Finally write up your product details and get some images. Ideally You will want to resize your images to about 400×400 pixels at about 72dpi for the store. If that sounds like greek don’t worry the store plugin can also resize images.

Now that is an easy way to get an online storefront going!