After you’ve closed up a successful crowdfunding campaign and have shipped out all of the rewards to your backers, you might be thinking about turning this project into a full-fledged eCommerce business. The next question I frequently get asked is “What’s the best way to do that?”
First of all, congratulations on the successful campaign! You’ve already proven that you can handle the management of manufacturing and shipping out rewards. Now it’s time to select a reliable way for future customers to buy from your business. Check out some of the options below.
Self-Hosted eCommerce Website
If you want to set up your own eCommerce website, with your own domain name, and that will be privately hosted, I recommend going with WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin as the building blocks of your backend technology.
In addition, I think that Bluehost would be a wise choice for a hosting service. I can always reach an english speaking customer support person with them and they have a simple WordPress install feature.
WooCommerce gives you a lot of options regarding payments, shipping, inventory, taxes, and reporting. They also have a lot of themes available that you can use to enhance the look and feel of your online store. Finally, should you have any issues, there is a thriving WordPress community online containing many of the answers to typical questions. This can save you time and financial resources hiring a developer if you get stuck.
Other options include: Magento, Prestashop, and Opencart. I’ve broken them down in this post.
Using an Online Store Builder
If you’re going to use an online store builder, I think that the two top contenders in terms of ease of use and functionality are Shopify and SquareSpace. Although SquareSpace does have amazing design templates, I tend to lean towards recommending Shopify because of the multitude of themes, apps, and integrations. Also, they have a helpful eCommerce forum and they’ve done a good job with their learning center (from one blogger to another).
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The one downside of using an online store builder is that you’re going to be paying monthly to stay in business (about $8 – $29 per month). On the flip side, you don’t have to maintain the backend of the website and remember to update plugins, themes, or deal with technical issues.
Overall, it depends on what your budget is like, your willingness to learn new technology, and how adept you are with setting up online tools.
Don’t Forget These Three Principles!
The worst thing in the world is to rest on your laurels and fail to service customer needs with the same level of enthusiasm and passion that you have in the past. A lot of the same principles that you may have learned during your crowdfunding campaign will also apply to your eCommerce business.
1. Try to provide as much support and to be as responsive as possible through “help docs” “frequency asked questions” and a thriving social media feed. Consumers have a lot of choices now a days from Walmart to Amazon and one way to break out in the midst of all that noise is to really care about your customers and work to solve their problems ahead of time.
2. Don’t forget that although you might think your creations are awesome, it takes more than one person to build a successful business. Investing in a high quality website design, unique logo, and well-written opt-in sales emails might seem like a waste of time, but they will help convince skeptical browsers of the merits of learning more about your company.
3. Finally, always look back and remember how the power of video and social media allowed you to raise funds via Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Why not incorporate more videos to share a bit about your company culture on your Facebook feed, or post images of new and upcoming internal projects?
Conclusion
There are a lot of other websites and tools that you can use to make an online eCommerce shop, but I’ve found these to be the most helpful. Let me know if you think differently in a comment down below, and I’ll consider adding other resources.
