My mother-in-law is graduating from being solely on Instagram for her business and now wants a website where she can put products up and then have people buy stuff through the website instead of having to manually text people about their orders over Instagram or messenger or whatever. I just have a personal website and have no experience whatsoever with online retail stuff.
So I guess the question is, what is the best option for her? Do I send her to squarespace? Is there a reputable company anyone can suggest? Hell, anyone here interested in the work? I’d rather send business to a community member rather than big corporations.
She is a seamstress and makes lots of custom fabric, vinyl, and light leather goods (purses, bags, keychains, clothes, pretty much anything you can do with a sewing machine). She is very talented and good at what she does.
I have very little interest in building her a retail website and learning everything that comes with it so I’d rather contract it out. If anyone has suggestions or is interested I’d love to hear from you.
Budget is probably the biggest thing, Id probably just start with square and if that works well pay for someone to make something better or if that meets all her needs then stay with it.
@kreestuh, might be able to better speak to this though
Squarespace is ok for normies. Shopify isn’t bad either. Shopify has better theme support for customization, but that might not be a plus if you’re not interested in working on it.
When you get to taking credit card numbers, it’s a huge ordeal. All kind of security restrictions, compliance, etc. Best to sign-up with a big service that already has all that worked out, and just takes a percentage off the top.
I’m not super well-versed with commerce, but Shopify is really a nice option. It doesn’t require a ton of work to setup and it has things like analytics and inventory management built in. If she’s selling physical products it also has tools for limiting locations to ship to/managing tax rates.
Squarespace and it’s ilk is pretty much where it’s at today. I think they even offer services to theme up your business at a reasonable expense ($1000-$5000 or so). Sure it’s a bit of money but for a business, even a small one, it isn’t that expensive.
I haven’t had the need to use those services myself and I’m pretty much retired from web development since 2014, but just call them up and explain what you need and I’m sure they’ll be happy to help.
Shopify literally exists to allow folks like your mother-in-law to build a web store themselves from start to finish by guiding them through the process and then charging them for whatever they need along the way; ironically the websites can be customized more than Squarespace who started as a website building service that includes shopping alongside.
Go with Shopify as they’re more mature and actually being able to sell stuff is important (as in she already has Instagram presence).
… have her try it herself, it takes about an afternoon.
Cool, I’ll do the Shopify thing then. Still need to find someone to set it up for her and everything. She is checked out of technology which is part of the reason she wants a more streamlined process than just taking orders over DM’s on Instagram lol
