 I'm gonna walk you through what to look for in an online store solution. Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where we share marketing agency insights, best practices, and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly, and I'm the co-founder and chief strategist here at Slam Agency, a digital first full service marketing agency. Today I wanna share with you the things to look for when selecting an online store solution. Now, many of us have had to transition to doing online sales. And when I say online sales, I'm specifically referring to e-commerce. So if you're a marketing director, if you are a small business owner, and you're saying that now is the time to get into the game, to develop and to invest in an online store, then this is the episode for you because I'm gonna go through, and I'm gonna walk you through what to look for in an online store solution. Many of these solutions that I'll talk to you about have a monthly fee associated with them. They're really easy to get up and running, and then you can learn as you go, you can get online, you can start selling things right away. But once you commit, once you put that on your website, like you're really making a commitment, it's not something that you wanna test one here and test one here, and then see which one works. Really, as a small business owner, you wanna be able to make an informed decision, that way you invest the time once, you invest the money once, and then you get rolling, all right? So if you've already started searching, doing some Google searches for online store solutions, online shopping engines, these types of things, then these are some of the names that you've probably discovered. Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, these are the ones that have them, they're hosted on their servers, they're able to connect to your domain name, but really all the security, all the, it's a very easy, what you see is what you get editor in terms of drag and drop, all of this stuff happens on their sites, okay? Then you also might have, you might've come across like a site called WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a plugin that you use with your WordPress site. There's advantages and disadvantages to that, and then there's a whole other category of software that you might run into, which is like just full on e-commerce solutions. And if you're watching this show and you're evaluating what you should do to get into the game, to get into online sales, then I can tell you right now, anything that is in that customized online e-commerce solutions, we're not even gonna mention the names because it's not necessary. It's just, it's overkill, it's too much. What you wanna do is you wanna dip your toes in, you wanna test the waters and see how it goes for you. So with that, let's review some of the things that you should be looking for as you're evaluating the Shopify's, the Squarespace's, the WooCommerce's of the world. Here's the first thing, ease of use. Obviously, you're not a e-commerce marketer. If you're watching this show trying to figure out which software solution to choose, that means this is not something that you've been trained in, this is not something that you do day in and day out. Now, it's something that you're gonna start doing, it's something that you're going to get to know very well and implement and integrate right away so that you can begin to make sales online. But as of right now, you're not an expert, okay? And so you need ease of use, you need a system that's easy to use. Now, when I think of WooCommerce, number one, I think that, of course, it's on WordPress, it's a plugin, easy to install, but then after that, it kinda gets complicated. It gets complicated not in terms of being difficult to add to your site, but it's complicated in what it could do, the potential negative effects to your site, if you don't know how to optimize it. Cause it just, out of the box loads all kinds of options which slows down your site, which hurts SEO. And if you don't know what you're doing, if you're novice, the ease of use there, it's just too much. Now, when I think of Shopify, that's one that's easy to use as a novice. Another one that's easy to use is Weebly, okay? Now, these, what I like about these is they have payment solutions built right into them. It's integrated to where you're able to just say, okay, I'm gonna use Stripe, and you just type in your credentials, if you don't have an account, like you can actually sign up, all the links, all the instructions are right there. So, for ease of use, for getting up and running right away, Shopify right out of the box, Weebly, I'm a big fan of that as well. Speaking of payment options, one of the things I want you to look at is making it, we've talked in previous shows, making it easy for people to check out. One of the ways to make it easy for people to check out on your website and your online store is to provide the payment options that they like to use. If you just provide one payment option, and that's not the option that I use, that's not the way that I typically make payments, then you're making it more difficult for me to complete the purchase. If that's the case, I could very well abandon the cart and go look for another provider of that product or service, okay? So you gotta make it easy, you make it easy by providing as many payment options as you can on your website. So when you're looking at a Squarespace, at a Weebly, what types of payment options do they allow you to do right out of the box? Most popular payment options are Paypal, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Stripe and Square, and you wanna make sure that your solutions have these in the blog that we post on our website for today's show. What I'll do is I'll break it down, I'll tell you which solutions accept which payment options out of the box, because here's what I know. Out of all of those that I mentioned, at least the online, what you see is what you get, drag and drop builders like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Shopify, they don't all accept every payment option. So you have to think about your customer, think about the types of payment options that they prefer, and then also take a look, as you're trying to evaluate payment options, take a look at when it comes to accepting payments, which of these payments are gonna take the most out of what's being paid to you? What are the fees? You might have a fee from a payment option, but then on top of that, you might have a transaction fee as well. So do your homework and on each site that we link to in the blog, each site, take a look at the transaction fees, and then add to that any processing fees that the payment provider will charge you as well. Now, most of these online stores are gonna have built-in marketing tools, not all are created equal. I think it's super important to have control over your SEO, and essentially that means title tags and meta descriptions and being able to name your products in a way that makes sense for your buyers and for the search engines, but then also marketing tools in terms of like advertising on Facebook, advertising in social media, doing pay per click, like connecting those product feeds to Google AdWords, these sorts of things. This is a little bit more advanced, it's not necessarily something that is going to prevent you from getting online tomorrow with the store, but it is something to consider. Finally, what I want you to take a look at is what's called integrations. Somewhere on each of these sites, there's gonna be a tab that shows you what other platforms, what other apps these online stores integrate with. This is very important, because what you wanted is you wanna think about how are you currently doing business? What apps, what software solutions are you currently using? Depending on your industry, it might be a POS system, it might be an accounting software. Double check that these online stores are able to integrate with your existing systems. Now, the disclaimer here is if you're using like a super custom industry accounting software or POS system, then it's very unlikely that they've innovated enough to get on the radar of some of these online stores, and that's fine. That just means that it's very unlikely that they integrate with much of anything at all. But if you're using QuickBooks, something that is widely used, by all means your online store, we should expect that to integrate with QuickBooks. So take a look, take a look at the integrations, and then just make sure that you have a plan in place to integrate what you're currently doing with what you're going to be doing. Because my bet is that as soon as you get online, as soon as you announce the fact that you have the ability to purchase your product from an online store, you're gonna see people begin to do that. And regardless of what happens in the future, when we finally get back to normal, you're gonna wanna continue with your online business. This will be a good thing for you because you're stepping out and you are developing another line of business that will be with you from here on out, all right? So these are the things to look for when looking for an online store solution. And I wanna end it with this, whatever it is, this is your first time getting into this area of e-commerce in general. Go with the starter package. Regardless of what features there might be in that intermediate or advanced package, regardless of how awesome that sounds, just go with the $20, the $29 package to start to get your hands dirty, to figure out what it is that you can do with this solution. And don't commit to an annual subscription, not yet. Give it a few months, make sure that you are making the right decision. Of course, you don't wanna have to reset and start over, but sometimes you do, and sometimes it makes sense to do that. And if that's the case, then you don't wanna be stuck in a year-long contract. So do yourself a favor, go with the starter package and go with a solution that is just a month or two. Hopefully there's a trial available. We'll make sure we have all that information just to click away for you. If you've enjoyed this show, do me a favor, let me know, send me a message, Tyler at slaymeagency.com. Hit me up on social media, anywhere at, that's the at sign, I am Tyler Kelly with an EY. If you're listening on a network, a podcast network, subscribe, rate, review. And as always, please share, we value your shares, your recommendations and your reviews. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Thanks for watching. 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