Looking To Move Away From eBay

shuffles03

I'm looking to setup an online store for my product range and was wondering should I go down the route of using services like Weebly, Shopify, Squarespace, a Wordpress domain with integrated Woocommerce or would I be better to get a store designed from scratch?

Also, has anyone experience with Stripe as a form of accepting credit card payments? I'm looking for an alternative to Paypal for the site. Paypal requires the customer to have an account whereas a service like Stripe doesn't (which would greatly help sales conversions).

All advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

blue4ever

From Scratch=Cash!

My 2p, Ive used shopify a lot and its fairly flexible but you really cant get at the core of it. They also clip the ticket for any sale, as do many hosted sites.

Selfhosting: i'd look at Magento - but it depends on how dirty you want your hands.

C

shuffles03

Cheers for the reply. I'd like a site where once live, I could really knuckle down and focus on optimisation. Not sure if my above suggestions allow me to do that though or if they already come pre-optimised.

shuffles03

When you say 'clip the ticket for any sale', what do you mean?

The Pontiac

I wouldn't be looking at an "alternative to Paypal", I'd be giving my customers a choice. I use both PayPal and Stripe for my Shopify store. Some people hate PayPal and visa versa.

Stripe is a great payment system. It was so easy to setup first day, I couldn't believe it. I was a bit surprised that the majority of my customers opt for Stripe over PayPal, as I'd opt for PayPal myself. Stripe's checkout is one of the best there is though.

I can only speak for Shopify and I find it so simple to use (adding products, collections, SEO etc.), but some say it's more expensive than others. But I find it does a lot of the work for you (lots of apps etc.), so I can apply my time and energy elsewhere. The support is probably the best there is too!

T-rev

With the amount of money you have paid eBay you could have probably got an e-commerce site set up.

shuffles03

T-rev wrote: »

With the amount of money you have paid eBay you could have probably got an e-commerce site set up.

I think so too. I currently use third party software to manage my eBay store and when that subscription ends in July, I plan to close the store. It's just too hard to compete there anymore. My products are completely lost in the search feed against guys horrendously undercutting on price coupled with cheap knock offs left, right and centre. Also, with eBay's new defect system coming into effect this August, it's going to be ridiculously hard to compete there.

At least if I had my own site, I can control (to some extent) how successful it could be. With eBay, I pay my entrance fee and that's as far as I can go. No SEO, no optimisation for search engines whatsoever.

Currently I'm listed on eBay.co.uk. £19.99 a month for a Basic Store and I get 100 free listings per month (with as many variations as I like) so it's not so bad really in that sense. With no listing fees, I've got FVF's and Paypal fees.

Looking at a platform like Shopify, I can have a Basic subscription for $29 per month or I can go for $79 per month. Paypal fees, Shopify's transaction fees (2% or 1% depending on which subscription I go for) will still apply as well as fees from another provider i.e. Stripe if I choose to use them.

I've done a bit of research on Shopify in terms of SEO etc and it all seems quite good.

rovoagho

shuffles03 wrote: »

I'm looking for an alternative to Paypal for the site. Paypal requires the customer to have an account

This hasn't been true for a long, long time now. On some particular integrations the link to paying without an account is (or at least was) certainly obfuscated, but in most cases doing so is pretty unambiguous. People do still have the idea in their head, but I generally make it clear on my site that an account isn't required.

shuffles03 wrote: »

Also, with eBay's new defect system coming into effect this August, it's going to be ridiculously hard to compete there.

I hadn't heard of that. There's a lot of info out there but it's incredibly OTT, any chance of a TL;DR? I'm a buyer, not a seller, just curious.

While it's hard to argue with the value provided by "SaaS" platforms, personally I'm a fan of self-hosting and self-managing, both for myself and my clients. There's no vendor lock-in, your data is your own, and you get to try something else (or do A/B testing) if you wish. It does add more expense though, and it's harder work, so you need to be prepared to jump in with both feet.

The only thing I would specifically advise against is building a store from scratch. Magento and WooCommerce and their equivalents have already done that work for you, and it's a lot of work. Getting someone to make something from scratch is fruitless unless you have very unusual requirements. Even then I usually try to find a way to hack something into the likes of WooCommerce or Magento!

EDIT: I agree with The Pontiac btw, Stripe is the bees knees. I still offer PayPal on my site though, people recognise the logo and like the guarantee. (It works, I recently got back well over €500 from 2 botched sales. That's why I'd use it before Stripe too, as a consumer. My customers are happy to use Stripe though, I guess because they know and trust me.)

shuffles03

rovoagho wrote: »

This hasn't been true for a long, long time now. On some particular integrations the link to paying without an account is (or at least was) certainly obfuscated, but in most cases doing so is pretty unambiguous. People do still have the idea in their head, but I generally make it clear on my site that an account isn't required.



I hadn't heard of that. There's a lot of info out there but it's incredibly OTT, any chance of a TL;DR? I'm a buyer, not a seller, just curious.

While it's hard to argue with the value provided by "SaaS" platforms, personally I'm a fan of self-hosting and self-managing, both for myself and my clients. There's no vendor lock-in, your data is your own, and you get to try something else (or do A/B testing) if you wish. It does add more expense though, and it's harder work, so you need to be prepared to jump in with both feet.

The only thing I would specifically advise against is building a store from scratch. Magento and WooCommerce and their equivalents have already done that work for you, and it's a lot of work. Getting someone to make something from scratch is fruitless unless you have very unusual requirements. Even then I usually try to find a way to hack something into the likes of WooCommerce or Magento!

EDIT: I agree with The Pontiac btw, Stripe is the bees knees. I still offer PayPal on my site though, people recognise the logo and like the guarantee. (It works, I recently got back well over €500 from 2 botched sales. That's why I'd use it before Stripe too, as a consumer. My customers are happy to use Stripe though, I guess because they know and trust me.)

What do you think of Shopify as a platform?

rovoagho

From what I've seen of it, it looks nice. However I self-host everything so I haven't used the backend and I'm not qualified to comment. If I were advising a customer on it, aside from the obvious stuff like hidden costs and usability, the main thing I'd be telling them to look out for long-term would be lock-in. Primarily, are your products and customers exportable, and are they exportable in a format other platforms can read?