Do you have a small business website and are looking to sell a couple of products or are you looking to create a simple eCommerce website and think it takes hundreds or thousands of dollars? In this final part of my Google sites series, we will take your small business website and set up a simple eCommerce website with a cart integration and keep track of the money you make.
This is part 3 of a series on building a small business website with Google sites. In part 1, we created the site and set up our basic pages for a video marketing company. In part 2, we upgraded the site with a professional domain name, email, booking page, and blog for our customers. In this final part, we are going to use a free app called Ecwid to create a store with some products and use a program called Wave Accounting to keep track of your finances.
Set up
The first thing we need to do is to set up our store. Head to your google site backend and log in to edit your site and we are going to add a store page. So, go to the pages tab and the ‘+’ icon to add a new page and we’ll name it “Store.” Now that the page is created it’s time to create the store and for that, we are going to use a free service called Ecwid.
Ecwid has a totally free plan that we can use to set up our eCommerce store but you are a couple of things you must know: 1) you are only allowed to list 5 products for free and 2) like Shopify you don't need to have an existing site to use it you can create a free site.
Once you get to Ecwid.com we will sign up for a new account and I suggest you sign up with your Google account associated with your business. Step 1 of sign up is to name your store and if you are embedding it on your google site the name isn’t really that important but we’ll just name it to store. Then we’ll set our region to the unites states and our currency.
For step 2 well put in our address and zip code. This is primarily for shipping products. I’ll just put in the address of my business and the zip code and click next. Step 3 is where we put a little more information about what we are selling. I’ll say I'm just getting started, I'm selling informational products and I’m setting up my own website. Finally, I already have a website and I won't need to add this address but it using the website builder you could create your own site name here.
Managing the Store
Here is the Ecwid Dashboard where we can manage our store. Let’s add some products. Under Catalog, click on products and this is the products page where we can manage products and pricing. By default, there are some dummy products that we want to own. Click on this box to choose all, bulk update list, and choose delete, to delete all the example products.
Adding Products
To add a new product, click the blue add new product button add your product details add in some product photos, and pricing, and add the product. You can add a description, UPC, Create variations, sell digital products, establish shipping, and other optimizations. If you want to sell more products or track your stock through the dashboard you will need to upgrade to the Venture level.
Taking Payments
To take payment for your online store, you will need to set that up with a payment processor. Ecwid has 3 built payment processors: Stripe, Square, and Paypal. Stripe and Square will charge 2.9% + 30¢ to take payments. Stripe allows subscription payment integration and square gives you charge back protection. If you have business account you can integrate it directly with manual controls.
Shipping
Finally, you can set up shipping options and preferences based on your particular business. Ecwid has 4 integrations for shipping: Post Office, UPS, FedEx, and DHL. Free shipping may impact how long it takes for your items will reach your customer. Conditional shipping rates are tier rates that are based on shipping speed and price. A flat rate sets a fixed shipping cost regardless of price or weight. Last are custom rates, where you can set up individual items' price or weights.
Adding the Store
Now that you have all your store items set up it’s time to add them to your Google site. Head to “Sales Channel” and then “Overview”, here we can pick which platform you would like to add your store to. Our Google site isn’t listed, so we will have to do a custom and then copy it to the clipboard. Once we have our code, head to our google site and add it to our Store page. To add our code, we will choose to embed and then “code” and paste. Expand the page to get the full view of the store and then you can preview it before we publish the store so we can get it up and running.
Conclusion
That completes our step-by-step guide to creating a professional website. In this video, I showed you how to use Ecwid but there an other providers like square or shopify that give you the same results but at a different price point. If you are looking to start a website for your business then Google sites may be viable option for you depending on the features, functionality and ease of use. If you are looking for help with setting up a website, you can contact us here at the University of La Verne SBDC for advice and resources.
Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.
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