Start Selling Products Online in Under an Hour

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13 min. read
Trevin Shirey

VP of Marketing
Trevin serves as the VP of Marketing at WebFX. He has worked on over 450 marketing campaigns and has been building websites for over 25 years. His work has been featured by Search Engine Land, USA Today, Fast Company and Inc.

So you’re ready to start an ecommerce business. You have the perfect company name, a marketing plan, and products to sell. The only thing you need is a website.

As it turns out, you need this last piece of the puzzle fast. If you don’t start moving some of your inventory soon, you’re going to lose money, and that’s that exactly the opposite of what you set out to do. 3950879219_811c3773c0_b If you’re scrambling to find robust ecommerce options that can also be set up quickly, I have a few ideas you can try. There are several options that will give you the tools you need to start selling online in an extremely short amount of time…

say an hour or less. In fact, many of these options will not only give you a functional storefront in the shortest amount of time possible, but also throw in gorgeous themes and extra options that you might not expect from your first online store. Let’s take a look at a few fast ecommerce platforms that will allow you to sell online quickly: the handmade paradise that is Etsy, the free WooCommerce plugin for WordPress, and three simple hosted ecommerce solutions, BigCommerce, Shopify, and Volusion.

Each option will come with a list of its perks, drawbacks, and any fees or pricing you should know about, all of which will help you pick the one that’s best so you can sell online now! Ready to start your store? Let’s begin!

Jump to the solution you want to learn about:

Etsy
WooCommerce
Hosted Ecommerce (BigCommerce, Shopify, Volusion)

For Handmade Items: Etsy

As you likely already know, Etsy is the Internet’s most popular marketplace for handcrafted and vintage products. If your new business specializes in either one of these items, you can start a store on Etsy in a matter of minutes, and potentially get an enormous amount of exposure on the website. etsy-1

Setup Speed

Etsy has one of the fastest onboarding processes I’ve ever seen.

I already had an Etsy account, so the process of opening a store took less than 60 seconds: I just had to answer two questions about my currency of choice and what my sales goals were before I was able to pick my shop name. etsy-2 After filling in your store name, the site will walk you through the process of setting up your first product. There are plenty of tips and helpful ideas around the text fields, and I appreciated the fact that every option was contained on a single screen.

Jumping from tab to tab to fill in product weights, copy, etc. can get really annoying. Once your first product is created, you’ll be prompted to enter your payment information.

If you have a PayPal account, you can use that to accept payments (although Etsy recommends a Business account, not a Personal one). You can also take advantage of Direct Checkout, which allows you to have funds deposited directly into your bank account. There’s a five day holding period before this method will work, but you can still sign up for it right on the spot.

After that, you’re pretty much done. Customize your shop a bit and you’ll be good to go!

Perks

As I mentioned, Etsy makes the process of starting your store extremely fast. Also, since you don’t have to set up a payment gateway, test your shopping cart, or do any kind of functionality testing, the setup time is cut back immensely.

Selling on Etsy allows you to immediately take advantage of Etsy gift cards and store-specific gift certificates. You can offer gift cards to your store quickly, which may be a great idea if you sell something like purses, jewelry, or anything else where a recipient could be “picky” about their choice. Another huge perk of selling on Etsy is that the site will automatically drop your information into Google Shopping, which means your products have a shot at showing up in search results on the “Shop” tab of a Google search.

You don’t have to do anything to get this to happen — Etsy does the work for you.

Drawbacks

The biggest drawback, obviously, is the fact that Etsy is only for handmade or vintage items (over 20 years old). If your ecommerce business specializes in the resale of items produced by a distributor, don’t even think about listing them on Etsy — they’ll be removed. Additionally, because Etsy has become so popular, competition is through the roof.

The site has a great faceted search system that helps browsers find what they’re looking for, but just listing your item with basic keywords like “bird necklace” will see your store buried somewhere around page 250, after the other 55,956 items: etsy-4 Setting up an Etsy store may take no time at all, but standing out on Etsy is another story altogether. Luckily, the site has a fantastic seller handbook that will teach you to do just that.

Fees

Etsy charges sellers a flat $0.20 fee for each item that they set up. Sellers are then charged a 3.5% transaction fee when the item sells (based on the item’s price, excluding taxes or shipping).

Note that item listings are only good for four months, so if your listing expires, you’ll have to pay to re-list it.

For WordPress Users: WooCommerce

If you’re in possession of your own hosting, are at least minimally familiar with WordPress, and want to start selling online ASAP, there’s a plugin for that. WooCommerce, an “ecommerce toolkit” made by the team at WooThemes, is a unique WordPress plugin that allows you to convert a blog into a fully functional ecommerce website.

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