Question of the Week - What do you use to sell products through your website?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jan Foselli on October 10, 2011 at 3:02am

Hi Rob,

Great question for someone like me who hasn't begun to build their site yet but is throwing the ideas around in her head.  My goal is to build a site for those who have to eat a gluten-free diet, as I do.  The purpose of my site is to educate consumers on their gluten-free choices while selling those products that I review.  I envision the use of You Tube videos on my site as I prepare foods and educate.   I guess it'll be a hybrid e-commerce site/educational type of thing.

Obviously, I'm not there yet.  All I've done is reserve the domain name!  www.everythingbutwheat.com!

I look forward to learning more through your group!

Permalink Reply by Rob Orr on October 10, 2011 at 5:53am

Thanks Jan and welcome to the group! I like the idea of your site and I'm anxious to see what you create. I really like the idea of coupling products with your subject matter. Let us know what questions you have, there are some really sharp people that are part of this group who can help.

Permalink Reply by Vickie Smith on October 11, 2011 at 9:48am

I sell Confessions of a Butcher-eat steak on a hamburger budget and save$$$ physical books on our meat site and I'd like to add the ebooks.   The ebook is currently available for Kindle but I just don't have a good way to sell them on the site yet.  I could use help figuring out clickbank and ejunkie.

Permalink Reply by Rob Orr on October 12, 2011 at 7:23am

I'm a meat-lover so your site is very interesting to me (I can hear the steak searing on the grill even now - yum!). What does your work flow for your products look like? There is another solution too called FoxyCart - have you looked at that?

Permalink Reply by Rory Tipton on October 26, 2011 at 2:40pm

We use an E-Commerce provider called Fortune3 for our Webstore, www.GunGearUSA.com. We searched quite extensively and had it narrowed down to Fortune3 and Volusion. The two features that pushed us to Forune3 were 1) no additional bandwidth charges. We saw a consistent theme of complants from users that they had outrageous charges and there was no way to estimate them. Since we planned on using videos and lots of pictures, this was a little scary. Otherwise, Volusion has a really nice platform and many people love them. 2) Fortune3 is actually software...so, you can make changes to the site offline and then upload the changes. This feature allows you to work faster since you do not have to wait for the internet to 'catch up.'

We also use Ebay, but that is another topic!

Rory

Permalink Reply by Rob Orr on November 1, 2011 at 11:53am

Great point about the bandwidth issue with Volusion. They've got a lot of people using their platform and I think it was probably a win-win with either platform you used.

Curious - What was your motivation to go with a hosted platform instead of self-hosted?