[Closed] Website building help

WooCommerce on WordPress will do that.

How about a web page that shows stuff we sell and a page showing our chocolates and their ingredients.

Is this possible for a complete numpty? It would need updating with every new chocolate.

We already have one but it's years old. It's hosted on Siteground .

Thanks, will look at WordPress etc.

Are they suggesting Eventbrite because you are selling place on events or physical items?

Zippy - again, WordPress is the answer for such a simple listing pages. The toughest part is setting up the install of WordPress, but many webhosts do that for free now.

You can add a Paypal page in WordPress. I don't think it costs any more than the usual PayPal fees, there's no monthly overhead. But I found it quite hard work to understand some of PayPal's terminology.

Wix?

If you say exactly what you want to do / display / sell you will get much better recommendations inc plugins to use on each platform.

If the agency are limiting you to Shopify they probably are limited in knowledge outside of the Shopify ecosystem. That said, it’s so easy you could probably make it yourself in Shopify and save the build costs towards monthly fees. You would also save a lot of hassle messing around with Wordpress on a low budget / limited tech knowledge that will require maintenance going forward.

Worth having a look at Square / Weebly too for a low cost solution:

https://squareup.com/help/gb/en/article/6629-set-up-your-weebly-powered-square-online-store

Depending on volume you can just get people to PayPal / bank transfer until it becomes a hassle if you are doing low volume coaching / tours etc vs high volume e-commerce.

Just to, you know, point out, that if your setting up a business that can't swallow a cost of sales of £30 a month (i.e. a quid a day), you might want to be looking at your business model.

Have a look at OpenCart which is a shopping cart platform and is free (you'll need to pay for web hosting from your domain provider). I've used it in the past and it works well. You can link it to PayPal or other merchant services to take payments.

IHN has it.
You can get a commerce plan for less than that on Squarespace if it's a fairly simple offering. It's easy to use so you shouldn't need a website builder.

I’ve run a small web store with my partner. Well, she ran it and I built and maintained it. I built it in Wordpress. Over the years, it became a pain to maintain every time we needed to patch and make sure everything still worked. When we didn’t patch we got hacked. It just wasn’t worth it for a small store. We now sell on Etsy. Zero web admin work for me. We sell more, enjoying the fact the Etsy platform pulls customers to our products. We used to maintain our own website as a blog and to point people to Etsy, but then we realised more sales were coming direct from Etsy then via our website to Etsy, so we’ve given up on the site entirely. If Etsy doesn’t fit, there are other platforms to look at.

Thanks all.
Yes, mainly events, hence the Eventbrite idea.
Regarding the £30/month fees etc. this isn't going to be a high turnover enterprise, and at the moment I'm unemployed so watching the pennies until I can get another job.
Also with Eventbrite I can get customers to absorb the admin/processing costs.

I was going to suggest Etsy.

Zippy if you do get something set up let me know I’ll be ordering some.

Watch the pennies, keep it as simple as possible when starting out. I know many people hitting 5k+ revenue using not much more than a Monzo / PayPal / Instagram and / or FB page combo. Flip side I know too many over estimating their revenue massively and focussing on every little tech detail / random requirement (acting diva like they are McDonald’s / AirBnB rather than a sole trader) instead of the core of what their business actually is. The fixed costs end up killing them.

Most important thing will be your actual event, followed by content, copy and images over what web platform you use.

Eventbrite is fine. Just pick the free / cheapest option and get started. If you do really well you can change all later.

Good luck with the business...

@sillysilly thanks, greatly appreciated.
As you say keep my initial outlay and costs low and see how it goes.
It might not go anywhere, and if not I haven't paid out £1000's.

I have a web business - I have a Shopify store under my own domain name and two Etsy stores - all products I design and make myself. Etsy is OK to get started but their commission is very high at 20% (including postage) and they can shut you down for pretty trivial reasons if they don't like you / get a bad review etc. Some people have had Etsy stores for years, total reliant and find they pull the rug. The good thing about Etsy is that you'll probably reach a bigger audience than you could yourself - you can also get a big sales spike at Christmas if you have the right products. Shopify is pretty good as it's reliable and very secure - if you can't sell enough to pay the fees, you probably better spending your time doing something else TBH. Configuring your products / store can be tricky if you offer lots of options / customisation. The thing about Shopify is that you are 100% responsible for driving traffic through web search, social media - the amount of effort this takes is massive in comparison to creating a web store. You also need to do it regularly. Very roughly, you need to direct about 1,000 people to your store to generate 1-2 sales as that's a normal conversion rate for an online store. Realistically, you need 1,000s of Instagram followers and being on social media with interesting content every day. Finally, paid adverts on Facebook / Google search don't work unless you've get a mega budget because others have got more money to spend / bump you down the rankings. 99% of web stores fail for the simple reason that they fail to generate enough traffic, not that they have a great product idea. Good luck!