Easy steps to set up an eShop on your blog even without your own products!

I am a firm believer that anyone can have a shop on their site regardless of their niche and content. In fact, in WooCommerce, you can promote affiliate products and links if you have not yet created resources of your own!

If you’re new to starting an eshop, hopefully these tips will help give you direction and confidence. If you’re already running your own eshop feel free to share some of your eshop experience and what’s worked for you in the comment section below.

5 Tips to Starting an eShop on your Website

Starting an eshop on your website might be challenging, especially if you don’t know where to begin. This article will give you a few tips in the right direction toward starting an eshop.

1. Make it easy on yourself by making sure you’re on self-hosted WordPress whether just starting out or if you’re planning on expanding your current website.

That’s not to say you can’t do it on another platform, it’s just a lot easier in my opinion.

WordPress is easy to use, and with a little bit of time, easy to learn. It also has a lot of free tools that you can use to start an eShop, without having to break the bank. You can also get an eShop up and running in a couple hours. This is perfect for the Do-it-Yourself crowd.

2. Install the ecommerce plugin known at WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that allows you to run an eShop on your website. It’s easy to set up. You can sell both tangible items that need to be shipped, or digital downloads.

For me, I do not remotely have the time to ship anything so I have even made t-shirts through Amazon’s Merch that I link to in my website shop and Amazon handles all of the printing, shipping, and more and I still earn both affiliate and designer sales. When you install the plugin, and then activate it, the plugin goes through a short installation wizard.

When you install the plugin, and then activate it, the plugin goes through a short installation wizard. Once you’ve run the installation wizard, you go through the settings tabs, and set everything up. You can set up things like how you want to set up your shop, who you want to sell to, and people can pay for their items through paypal.

3. Use enticing pictures to attract buyers to your products.

Like book covers, the images you use for your pictures can make a difference in whether you’ll make the sale or not. Even if the product is a digital item, you should have some type of enticing image set so potential buyers will know what it is, and decide to buy the item.

Also, try to make sure the picture is of decent quality. If possible, have several images available for buyers to look at.

4. Write thorough product descriptions.

It’s really important to educate your customers about what you’re selling and it’s also important for Google because you can easily build great SEO on merchandise. Placing a short description doesn’t help the customer decide if your product will be the solution that they need and doesn’t help you rank for search engines.

5. Offer several methods that buyers can use to pay for your products if you’re on https.

Your buyers have preferred methods of payment, so only offering one method might deter some from buying from your eShop. I personally don’t want to switch my shop over to a subdomain and have ad income that I want to keep for my whole shop (networks have less options with https sites). But if you have the option, go ahead and give your customers a variety of means to pay. Also, one method of payment might fail, so having another type available, may make a difference in getting the sale or not.

Also, one method of payment might fail, so having another type available, may make a difference in getting the sale or not.