Create your own eCommerce platform with Wix

In 2015, there are very few businesses that can afford to keep going without an online presence. When a few years back it was a real hassle to start a website, update it and run it as an individual, when you had little or no technical knowledge, today nothing is easier. Thanks to platforms like Wix.com you can now create your very own online store in just a few hours.

You just need to go to Wix, and click on Create your store.

You are then offered a number of templates, which are basic designs for your website that you can customize to your liking. The most similar the template to what you are actually looking for, the less work involved into making it look perfect. So to make things easier, you can search for keywords, like I did for electrician. So I was presented with a number of templates:

Once you pick the one you like best, Wix opens the Website Editor.
This is the place where all the custom design happens. Again, you don’t need any technical skills. Just click on the template where you would like to edit it, and you will get a new box to open for you to update the text, font, size, etc.

In that case, I clicked on the phone number, and as you can see I can change it, make the font bigger or pick a different color. As you can see the site already has a few pages like “Services”, “Contact”, which will be very useful for my electrician business. But you can also click on pages and add new pages or remove/rename these ones. As you progress, unlike many software to build websites where you have to click “see a preview” to see how it would look like, you see the website evolving before your eyes.
It looks like a Word editor really, that simple. And once you are happy and save your website, Wix will take it online for you. You have several options. You can get a domain like electricianinflorida.wix.com in which case hosting your website on Wix will be free, and you will also see a “powered by Wix” mention on it, or you can get your own .com domain, in this case electricianinflorida.com, and pay Wix a hosting fee in order to get an ad free website.

But let’s keep talking about the website creation and design. Now that you have input all your personal details, the company’s phone number, filled up the About page and put your own pictures in the background, don’t forget to save a copy of your work so you can come back to it at a later time. Then, it is time to talk about your products. As an electrician, I may want to sell electric products such as generators, bulbs, cables or meters, and I can also offer customers to prepay for my time via the eCommerce platform. That would enable me to only visit clients who have paid the first hour of labor for example, so I make sure I’m not going there for nothing.

This particular template didn’t come with the Wix Stores app installed so I had to go to the Wix App Market and look up the WixStores then add it to my site.

Once the store is installed, I am presented with a series of products, each with their description, price and picture.

I simply need to click on a product to edit it, and adapt it to my own needs. Under product management, you can choose to make a certain product visible on the website or not, for example for when you are out of stock, you can also mention to the system how many you do happen to have in stock, and your stocks will update with every online sale. You can add as much information as you like about the product, even its weight to help shipping information. You can make collections of products to help your customers search, for example they could browse “bulbs” or “cables” and be only offered such products.

You are also prompted to add Shipping and Tax details, allowing you to sell only to customers in specific countries, or worldwide.

You will also be entering the store’s settings, its name, the language you are managing the website in, the currency of sales, the weight format (kilos, pounds..) as well as your terms annd conditions, privacy policy and refund policy. All these things will be inserted on the website without you having to check that they do appear on every page and change every page if you decide to change the phone number for example. Compared to old site builders it will save you hours if not days over the lifetime of your business.

You can add coupons, discounts and special offers as well. The advantage of the Wix eCommerce platform is that it allows you to sync your website with PayPal and credit card processors Wirecard and Stripe in order for your customers to pay safely online.
There are no setup fees, and you are only being charged per transaction. Wix does charge a fee for you to create a website with the eCommerce platform.