We’re often asked by friends and strangers how they can set up a quick and easy online store to sell something they’re making or would like to make. Usually there’s no really good answer, except to try a place like Etsy or hire someone to create a simple ecommerce website. But now there’s a rather nice little service which aims to make it so easy to create an online store that even your grandma could do it.
Shoptsie is a very simple service which lets you create an online store in minutes. All you need are some nice images of your products, and a little time to upload and categorize them. The finished store comes with just about everything you’ll need baked in, including payment (you will be able to accept Paypal and credit cards), a free Facebook store which you can embed on your page, a currency converter, coupons and more.
You can choose from around a dozen themes, which are actually all pretty nice, and very functional (let’s face it, you just need the products to look good on the page, right?) and there are also apps you can add to make your site do more. So for instance you can add a language app to let your foreign visitors view the site in their language. There are also social networks, and contest apps, and we guess that more will appear over time.
But the main feature as far as we can see, is the ease of use of set up and management. No complex menus, or buried features, just a really easy to understand set of options you can use almost immediately. You will need to have some idea of how you want your store to look though, as the themes don’t come with any banner or logo graphics, so you’ll need to add those yourself. But it’s not rocket science if you’re familiar with cropping images and stuff. And logos can be bought on Fiverr.com very reasonably nowadays.
All in all, this is a great way to get going quickly with your very own store. Right now the service is in beta, so you can sell unlimited products for free, but once it’s running properly you will only get 20 products for free, and then have to pay, but 500 products and your own domain name for just $7 a month is hardly a massive cost. Nice!