Where to sell online

How to sell online: making the move from auction website to own website

Moving from auction website to your own online shop may be easier than you thought.

If you have been running your own site on an auction website, you will be familiar with the process of entering your products, uploading photos, setting prices and configuring your postage/shipping options. You will also be familiar with the disadvantages of selling on auction websites: success fees that you must pay to the auction website provider, and in some cases significant limitations in the payment options you can offer customers.

These disadvantages have led even seasoned premium sellers to look for new ways to offer flexibility to their customers. Like more payment options and to take advantage of premium ecommerce website features. For example: offering digital (downloadable) products, multiple shipping addresses, order management, Australia Post live calculators, gift vouchers, promo codes, accepting credit cards in your store, newsletter management, cross sales tools and more.

If you are looking to move from an auction site to your own website, how do you go about it? How do you start to sell online?

Where to sell online: places other than auction websites

If you’re not looking to sell on an auction website, there are many shopping cart providers you can choose from. A shopping cart seller like Ozcart provides you with your own website, with its own domain name (like www.yoursite.com.au) and all the tools to add and update your own products. Ozcart is a hosted shopping cart, which means that we take care of the server the website runs on, and you take care of your shop. You get a web-based administrative control panel to log in to to add and edit your products and photos, set specials, place advertising banners on your website, configure the payment options you wish to accept and set the shipping costs and handling charges you wish to apply. All for one monthly payment that includes your hosting and support fees.

Not all shopping cart software providers offer hosted solutions so it pays to check with the provider you wish to use.

If you’re an auction site owner looking to set up your own online store, think about the following:

1. How will your ecommerce website look? Will your shopping cart provider personalise the web design of your site to suit your business? Can you choose the colours that match your business and have images appropriate to your business inserted? Will they insert your logo for free? Some shopping cart providers give you a standard theme-based design that you have to change yourself, others take a more comprehensive approach and use professional graphic designers to personalise the site to you.

2. Does the site include search-engine friendly URLs? Web page names like www.yoursite.com.au/category/product-name.html are more likely to be easily indexed by search engines than ones that have question marks in them with long and complex names

3. Does the ecommerce provider offer Australian based support or is it outsourced to another country?

4. Is your provider an ecommerce specialist? That is, are the site’s servers optimised for ecommerce or are they merely hosting a whole lot of different sites?

5. Does your site have room to grow or will your monthly payments keep going up as your store becomes more successful? Not all shopping cart software providers offer you unlimited products and unlimited content pages. Ozcart does though.

Shopping cart websites give you the flexibility to manage your own store the way you want to manage them without auction fees, success fees, limitations on whether you can offer downloadable products or having your provider dictate what payment options you can offer. They are easy to get started with and can really help your business grow.