Author Topic: online marketplace for my business  (Read 1698 times)

ninja

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online marketplace for my business
« on: August 08, 2018, 02:24:07 PM »
I'm looking for a means to sell my roasted coffee online... what's a great way to do this? I'm computer savvy enough to put something together with a website if I need to - I used to operate a blog. I've been considering squarespace - but I don't know what all is out there and what is better. What are your recommendations?

Proud Foot

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Re: online marketplace for my business
« Reply #1 on: August 24, 2018, 09:02:14 AM »
I don't know what all is out there and am only familiar with square. If you are using square to process sales at the farmers market then their online store is a great solution as all your sales will be within the same system. I used it a few years ago while my wife and I were selling T-shirts for a fundraiser.

Samuel

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Re: online marketplace for my business
« Reply #2 on: August 24, 2018, 04:00:57 PM »
My most entrepreneurial friend swears by Shopify.

tralfamadorian

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Re: online marketplace for my business
« Reply #3 on: August 24, 2018, 07:29:27 PM »
Do you plan on offering on multiple platforms? Amazon? Etsy? Your own .com retail? A separate .com wholesale?

Which other sites you want to use can affect your choice for your main platform. You want your main platform to have full integration with the axillary sites so you can see your inventory, orders, customer interaction being pulled into your platform and also the platform pushing new products, inventory levels, tracking numbers, etc out to the other sites.

Squarespace is pretty good on the social media integrations, not so great on the nuts and bolts successful product based business integrations so you would probably want to use a hub platform like shipstation.

Some of the names I see a lot for ecommerce sites outside of the large marketplaces are:
Shopify
Big Commerce
Woo Commerce
3d Cart

ninja

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Re: online marketplace for my business
« Reply #4 on: September 14, 2018, 12:52:02 PM »
I ended up finding hosting for 3.50/month if I paid for three years and then built my site with Wordpress using WooCommerce. It's working good for my purposes.

I'm thinking my next online business step will be to try and get my product on Etsy.