Should You Self-Host Your eCom Store?

If you want to add any form of eCommerce to your website, then there are a number of different tools you can use to do this and a number of different eCommerce platforms.

This is going to be an important decision for your business, as choosing the right platform will help to give you access to more features and plugins while at the same time building more trust and thereby encouraging more sales.

There is a very thin line between success and failure when it comes to any online business. That is to say, if you have a good business model but it’s not making you a lot of money right now, it could be the tiniest thing that’s currently holding you back.

Likewise, it might be that the smallest little change could take your currently struggling business model and turn it into a massive money maker.

One example of just such a small change that can make all the difference, is to add at least one very cheap item to your eCommerce store. Whether you are making money from subscribers or one-off payments, this can make a massive difference.

Some eCommerce Solutions To Choose From

Here are a few of the most popular options and some of their differences:

Shopify – Shopify is a hosted eCommerce solution. That means you don’t host the store on your own site which makes things a lot easier but also reduces some of the flexibility.
Shopify is used by a lot of big companies, including some Fortune 500 companies, and it’s capable of storing up to 5,000 items for you to sell. It’s highly customizable, easy to install plugins with just a few clicks, and relatively inexpensive to begin with.
BigCommerce – BigCommerce is the closest direct competition for Shopify as it is also an example of a hosted platform. This is a bit more expensive though and lesser known with fewer plugins. The main advantage? It has a lot of support for international payments.
Magento – Magento is a self-hosted solution that’s capable of hosting up to 500,000 items! It’s highly flexible too but also very fiddly. This is a good option for a large corporation but not so good if you’re a smaller business.
WooCommerce – WooCommerce is another self-hosted option but the big advantage this time around is that it’s a plugin for WordPress. That means it will integrate seamlessly with a lot of websites and is easy to customize and add features to.
Volusion – Volusion is another option with a lot of unique benefits – this one is particularly useful for marketers trying to sell digital products.

Apps To Help You Sell More On Shopify

One of the best things about Shopify is that it lets you install additional apps to enhance the features. This works just the same as the plugins available on WordPress and lets you greatly expand the capabilities of your store. When you use these right, they can create almost limitless new opportunities and help you sell your products in a myriad of new ways.

Here are just a few:

- Chimpified – If you use MailChimp as your autoresponder, then this is a fantastic plugin that will help you make more sales. You’ll now be able to track your potential customers and subscribers and thereby use techniques like remarketing. This means that you offered tailored promotions to customers who have shown an interest in your products before!
- LeadDyno – LeadDyno is a tool for adding affiliate programs to your products. Now you can offer a commission on your sales, thereby motivating countless more marketers to help you make more sales.
- Mobile App For Your Shop – This lets you turn your store into a mobile app. Now your users can easily click to buy more products.
- Shopify Widgets – Shopify widgets lets you add a widget to any website showing off your products. This way you can gain sales directly from your website and have them constantly in view visitors enjoy your content.
- Facebook Store – This is a simple app that has a very powerful use. This lets your Facebook page act as a storefront so that now anyone who visits your page on Facebook can buy directly from there. This can help you to massively monetize your social media efforts.
- Plugin SEO – SEO is a very important tool for getting people to actually find your site. Using Plugin SEO You can automate a lot of this process so that you don’t have to do it all manually

Selling Physical Products On A Subscription Basis

When you hear the word “subscription” you will often think of a magazine or perhaps a subscription site. In other words, you tend to think of this as being an informational product.

But what if you have a physical product? Maybe you even have a physical store from which to sell it?

In this case, there are still plenty of great ways to set up a recurring payment scheme and thereby enjoy a much more stable and much more passive income.

Here are some examples of ways you can use this system with a physical product.

Disposables – If you sell anything from your website that you would describe as being disposable then a subscription can be a perfect way to sell.
Great examples include food items that might run out quickly, face creams, or supplements such as protein shakes. In all these cases, your buyers can ensure that they get a new product each time they run out and thus never have to worry about running out again!

Package – There are many types of physical products that lend themselves well to being sold in a package and this can be another opportunity to provide a useful service by selling a subscription. A popular example of this for instance is to sell clothes in packs that provide a ready-made outfit. Several diets have recently become popular by providing the ingredients for meals in a box that’s ready to make and eat and that’s calorie controlled.
You can even have to produce these products yourself. This is a great way to sell packages as a reseller for instance. And, this way there’s no risk because you received the payment in advance.

Gifts – If your customers are the forgetful types, then why not let them set up a yearly payment for a gift? This way they can send flowers, chocolates or jewelry every year on their anniversary for instance!

A Membership Site

A membership site can also be a highly lucrative business model and a great way to gain passive, recurring income.

At the same time though, convincing people to pay for your membership can be difficult. As a rule, a lot of things we discover online are free, and as such a lot of us aren’t used to paying for them. If you want to make more money from your site, you’re going to need to think about how you’re going to cross that border and get people to put down money for your stuff.

Here are some tips that can help you:

- Make It Sound Exciting – People love to be part of a movement and community. This is how you need to make it sound to be a member of your site. Explain to people that they’ll be part of something exciting and be sure to refer to your members as ‘VIPs’ or ‘exclusive members’.
- Offer Levels Of Membership – IF you want to charge a lot for membership, this can be a difficult challenge to overcome. One useful strategy then is to offer different levels of membership. Perhaps you charge $5 a month for access to certain pages, but $25 for full, unrestricted access.
- Free Trial – The best way to get someone to buy a puppy is to let them take it home for a week.
  You can do something similar with your membership. Let your users try it for free so that they see the full benefits and become big fans of what you do. Only ask for payment once your visitors have seen that it’s worthwhile!

Why a Cheap Item Can Make a Massive Difference

The problem when trying to sell a big-ticket item on an online store is that you’re basically trying to overcome two very powerful barriers to making a sale.

The first and most obvious barrier is that your products are expensive and people take a lot of convincing if they’re going to buy something for a lot of money.

The second barrier is that people don’t like buying online from new sources. If they’ve never dealt with your business before, then they’ll be concerned about security and they won’t know whether to trust your delivery system or not.

Thus, trying to get someone to pay for something very expensive on a completely alien site is an uphill battle.

On the other hand though, if you can get them to buy one very small item – even if it just costs $5 – this will now make it much easier to get them to buy future items for much more money. Especially if you provide them with great service and a really high-quality product.

Benefits Using Shopify For Your eCommerce Store

Shopify is one of the best choices if you want to add an eCommerce store to your site, or just start an eCom business.
So, why is Shopify such a good choice and how can you make the most out of it?

What Is Shopify?

Shopify is an eCommerce store builder that allows you to sell any kind of item from your website. It doesn’t matter if it’s a physical product, a digital product, or a subscription.

Shopify is also what’s known as a hosted solution. This means that you don’t need your own domain, but I highly recommend you to have one, and you don’t need to install it yourself. Rather, you just create a profile and set up your store that way, and link to it from your website.

This is one of the first advantages of Shopify. It’s incredibly quick, easy, and reliable. You can create your store in a few clicks which takes just a few minutes. At the same time, you donät need to worry about your hosting provider going down or your site getting bogged down with traffic.

Features And Benefits

On the face of it, you would think that Shopify would be less flexible owing to its hosted nature. Actually, though, Shopify gets around this by letting you install a large number of paid and free themes as well as countless apps that extend the power of your store.

This means for instance that you can create a members-only store, you can create a membership website, can charge recurring payments, can sell digital products and you can even integrate your site easily with your shop by using widgets.

Then there’s the option to add your products to your Facebook page or to create an app!

Best of all, it’s actually very affordable, to begin with, so this really is the easiest way to start selling products from your site!

Wrapping Up

I can’t really say that this was my best blog post, but the fact remains. An eCommerce business is one of the absolutely best businesses you can have if you think money-wise.

Before you decide to start building up your online store, find out which platform you want to use. There are some to choose from, both paid options and free ones. Should you host your store yourself or should you have a hosted solution, here you don’t have to host it yourself.

If you choose to have a hosted solution I recommend Shopify. Shopify is not free but the benefits overcome the price.

If you have these tips in the back of your mind, I’m almost certain that you’ll be successful with your eCommerce business.

There is other hosted solution too like the newcomer ShopFunnels and Dropshiply 2.0.