Many businesses are desperate to start selling products online, with many making the mistake of paying thousands of pounds for a full shopping cart to be installed on their site or even designed for them. In some circumstances, you do not always need an expensive shopping cart or costly website to start selling your items, in fact, it can often be an expense that many businesses just do not feel they can justify but feel they have to spend the money to move forward.
There are some alternatives to using a full blown online ecommerce shopping cart, which many people tend to overlook in the rush to get their sales increased by developing and implementing something they might not need.
Below, we look at some of the alternatives to having a full ecommerce solution:
eBay - The famous online auction site has been established and developing for many years, with the invention of the eBay shops allowing retailers to start selling their goods via this method if they do not feel an ecommerce solution is really for them. eBay has pretty much opened online selling up to the whole world, as if you want a shop all you have to do is pay a small monthly fee, upload your products and eBay does everything else for you. You immediately have access and exposure to millions of people, something you would probably never achieve if you were trying to do this yourself on your own online shop.
WordPress Shop - The popular blog / cms solution WordPress has a wealth of online shop "plugins" which allow you to simply install and start selling, normally using PayPal as the payment processor. Some of the best shops you do have to pay for, but we have found well over 5 that really do the job very well and allow you to have a small online shop running quickly, easily and efficiently in terms of the length of time it will take you to get things moving.
PayPal / Google Checkout - If you have a PayPal or Google Checkout account, you can start using these payment processors to start selling your goods online, pretty much straight away. A PayPal merchant account should be used if you are a business, but once this is set up you can then create individual buttons and prices for all of your products and then connect them up to your website. Although it will be time consuming if you have quite a few products, the process is really simply as all you need to do is copy and paste some code into your website and you will be ready to sell with in minutes.
The three options we mention above are not the only alternatives to having a full shopping cart for your site, but they are by far the three easiest solutions if you want to start selling products online.
Ian Spencer works for Clear Web Services, a SEO Web Optimisation and Web Design company serving the Forest Of Dean, Gloucestershire and South Wales.
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