First of all I needed to get my website/ecommerce shop going.
If you aren’t very into the topic yet where would you start looking? You guessed it Shopify (nice anekdote aside, one of their founders went to the same high-school year as I did in Germany)…
It was very easy to set up an initial website and store but the downside was the pricing… Paying at least $29 plus UK VAT for a store which won’t be selling much for quite a while I guessed wasn’t really an option (business idea for you guys at Shopify: offer a beginner plan which is based on turnover to give new businesses an easier start).
After some googling I came up with option number two: Wix. Again webhosting and website/ecommerce combined in one package and quite a bit less expensive than Shopify. I started setting up the framework for my store (very easy to do) but run quite quickly into limitations (e.g. no sub-categories for products) which again let me start looking for an alternative.
And here we are Woocommerce. A free (at least I thought so…) ecommerce package for WordPress. But it doesn’t come with a webhosting package. Which lead to the next challenge, finding the best suited Webhoster, but that’s a topic for another blog.
As you can maybe see I stayed with Woocommerce so far, as it offers all the flexibility I was looking for (hundreds of available add ons make that possible) but it comes with a price tag as most of them need an annual subscription, so you pay for webhosting plus all the WordPress/Woocommerce add ons you want to use (in theory you don’t need any, as everything could be handcoded but add ons provide you with a lot of convenient features).
I mangaged so far to live with just two of these paid ones: the Astra theme and Elementator Pro as editor.
At the moment I’m looking into another add on to enable building customer defined product bundles (there’s one directly from Woocommerce for $99 per year) but other lower cost ones are around. I’ll try some of them and will blog about the outcome.
Enough for now. Let me know in the comments about your experience with setting up your first ecommerce business.
