Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Teresa Escoffery on November 8, 2016 at 10:29am

The "engine" for online selling is the easy part -- there are lots of options depending on your level of sophistication and complexity you need.

The bigger question I would have is how are you going to get customers to your site? Start by Googling the brand you sell and see what comes up in terms of both paid and organic search results.

you also have to spend the time uploading images and descriptions of all of your products to your website.  Even cutting and pasting this info from your supplier's websites is time consuming -count on two minutes per (which may not sound like a lot, but our spa has nearly 200 skus in make up alone), even more if you are going to have live inventory counts in your website so people aren't frustrated by ordering something that is actually OOS.

Then what is your fulfillment mechanism? Who is going to pack and ship? Charging for shipping is a tough arguement to win when so many ship for free. 

Will it really be worth the time and expense?

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Permalink Reply by Liza on November 8, 2016 at 6:42pm

Thank you Teresa for your response.

I have clients who drive an hour or more to see me, and I would just like to make purchasing their retail from me easier, so they don't have to wait between appointments (or order online from someone else!). I am looking for something very small scale, not looking to become a nationwide retail center.

Do you have any engines that you like? That are relatively easy to handle?

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Permalink Reply by Teresa Escoffery on November 9, 2016 at 3:10pm

We have a similar situation -- honestly, they just phone in the orders and we ship for free. Our spa software keeps credit cards on file so we dont even have to ask for that.

Our website has a retailing section which we are starting to populate, but moreso from an advertising perspective that people see our site, see all the products in the categories and know we are more than just services.  Eventually we will sell online, but is a long time coming.

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Permalink Reply by George on November 18, 2016 at 9:43am

Do you have an existing website now? How many orders do you expect to process per week? Do you plan to expand the marketing beyond your current client base? Do you need to integrate it to spa or salon software?

If you have a Wordpress based site, then I highly recommend Woo Commerce plugin. A more sophisticated platform that is tops in its class is Shopify. If you have or expect to use spa software, e.g. Transcend, Orchid, then they have their own integrated shopping cart.

If you are looking at infrequent onesy orders, then you want none of the above. You can use a third party store to add your products. I don't have any first hand knowledge on choices other than Amazon, which is a little pricey for low volume users.

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Permalink Reply by Diane White on January 14, 2017 at 6:17am

Shopify is pretty easy to use. Unfortunately I was midway through setting it up when my website software discontinued compatibility in favor of their own app.

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