Shopify + Google Checkout
I think the problem with online businesses is that everyone wants to make a million without any investment at all and without doing anything at all. WAKE UP! It’s not going to happen. It’s pretty dang hard to do that. You may start with a cheap FREE solution, but eventually you’re going to have to do some investing in your site/business.
I think I have found something for people to start with that don’t have a lot of experience. I have been reviewing these two options for some time and I think I have used them enough now to make a recommendation.
To really make an ecommerce website work, there are two main things that you need:
- Shopping Cart
- Merchant Account
Shopping Cart
If you don’t know what a shopping cart is, look it up on wikipedia. For the most part a shopping cart is nothing more than the software used to manage transactions and shopping carts when people purchase products online. There are a lot to choose from, but they either cost too much or are hard to use. Getting them to look the way you want them too and getting them to function the way you want them to is hard sometimes too.
Shopify is a good starting point. With Shopify it is the easiest shopping cart I have ever tried using. It takes a minute to understand the organization of it, but it is organized way better than any shopping cart I have run into. The way you enter in your products is so simple it’s crazy. It’s FREE to set up and it doesn’t cost anything for hosting. How they charge you is based on your sales. If you sale less than $10,000 a month they take 3% of your transactions. If you make over $10,000 a month, they charge 2%. Pretty simple. If you are huge and selling tons then 2% can add up after awhile and it may be worth paying someone to put together another shopping cart for you, but to begin with it’s an awesome option. That 3% or 2% doesn’t include merchant account fees.
Shopify is compatible with PayPal and Google Checkout. So If you understand those fees then Shopify can be set up in no time.
Shopify also makes it really easy to create content pages. It doesn’t necessarily give you the ability to add meta tags, but you can change what the url of each page is. You can also make your domain name work with it too. To make it easy on yourself, get your domain from GoDaddy because they give you exact instructions on how to implement a domain from GoDaddy.
Merchant Accounts
PayPal is accepted just about anywhere, and that can be a great option to use with Shopify, but their fees are around 3% per transaction and if you add the 3% with the Shopify of 3% or 2%, that adds up and becomes expensive. Then again, keep in mind a good secure shopping cart can cost upwards of $50 a month.
Google Checkout on the other hand is allowing customers to process all credit cards FREE until at least the end of 2007. It works much like PayPal. If you use Google Checkout that basically limits any type of fees to the 3% or 2% per transaction fees that Shopify charges.
Conclusion
You have nothing to lose with Shopify and Google Checkout so I recommend going and setting up some accounts today. They don’t cost a thing until you actually sell anything. You have nothing to lose at all.