Modern Vespa

My wife started doing pottery about a year ago an is surprisingly good at it. She created a FB and Insta page and she is starting to attract interest in her art.

I have been out of web developement for some time so I am not up to speed on it anymore.

So the question is if you were going to start an ecommerce site to sell a narrow range of products how would you do it? Not interested in Etsy or similar.

Specs:
Accept multiple forms of payment including crypto.
User friendly. My wife needs to be able to add items or collections and control inventory numbers and she is not a programmer.
Low cost obviously.

I already own "Justoutofthekiln.com" which is the name of her LLC so I want that to show in the URL.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

My wife is in this space and she said Wix or Shopify are both simple straightforward options, but with limited customization. If looking for something more features and customization, check out Webflow.

Yep. Also Squarespace.

I would have thought Etsy would be a viable option, no?

I can't offer much help regarding your actual question but I too have a wife who wants to switch over to being a full-time artist and am also interested in why she wants to avoid Etsy. Is it because it just sounds so, I don't know, corny or something? Like your band selling tunes on Bandcamp? (Guilty of that over here...)

And, if y'all feel like it, it would be fun to see her instagram.

I would recommend Shopify. They have a really nice integrated platform that allows for safe payment processing.

I did too but evidently my wife has a freind who had a bad experience with Etsy as a seller who also complained about fees.

Got it.

She has a freind who had a bad experience with Etsy and also didn't like the fees. Her Insta is https://www.instagram.com/justoutofthekiln/

OK looking at Shopify and Sqaurespace. Thanks everyone.

Not a web/ecommerce developer. I'm just a guy who sells stuff on on my wordpress based website using a plugin called woocommerce.

The only fees are paypal's fees, which I'd probably have to suffer regardless of which credit card processor I went with.

Very nice! Clearly a lot of thought and care goes into the work. Nice photography too.

Currently, Woocommerce is probably the best available hosting platform overall. Huge market penetration, a lot of addons and frequently updated for security, lots of support, etc. Woocommerce is a basically a plug in for WordPress. It's sort of free. There are a lot of companies that charge an annual fee for their plugins, so you want to work with a developer who can find plugins that don't have an annual fee, when possible. Sometimes the paid plug in is worth it though. When we do finally switch to another platform, we will likely go to Woocommerce. There are a whole lot of Woocommerce videos out there, and several easy to install and use templates that are free.

Our shop runs on a program called ZenCart. It has a lot of great features, but the reason I wouldn't recommend it is that there is not a lot of support, and some of the modules, like the one we were using for URLs, stopped working when we upgraded. The developer of the module is long gone, probably writing Woocommerce plugins . So we lost about ten years of links posted around the internet, and our SEO suffered.

Magento is another popular one, but there is a free version and a version owned by Oracle. Oracle could likely close down the free version ten minutes from now if they wanted, and cause issues with upgrades, security and payment/shipping modules.

Open cart is supposed to be very good, but I haven't checked into it a lot.

Paypal and a lot of the other payment platforms now keep the fees if someone gets a refund, cancels the order before it ships, etc. So you want to be able to make the paypal payment module authorize, and then you go in and manually capture the funds after you make sure it's an order that is going through. So if someone cancels a $300 order, you won't eat $20 in paypal fees just because. You, or your developer, are going to install a paypal module, a card processing module (square) and a crypto module in the payment modules section.

As far as shipping, I would recommend pirateship. They don't charge anything to you, other than the difference between what they pay and what you pay. Most of the other ones charge a monthly fee to give you the same rates you get from Pirateship just by signing up, and their international rates are very good.
Pirateship, and most shipping services, have a shipping plugin for most of the popular ecommerce platforms. You can link their site to your woocommerce site, and send the shipment information from your site to pirateship and print labels, without having to copypasta the information.
Here is a list of all the integrations pirateship offers, https://www.pirateship.com/integrations/shipping
and a good way to check for site software that won't become extinct two years down the road, would be to see what platform integrations most of the shipping and payment services support.

As far as developing the site, freelancer and fiverr have a lot of good people who will set up the site, install it on hosting, and do maintenance, for a whole lot less than what you pay for a site like shopify. And, unlike shopify, squarespace or etsy, you own the site, host it where you want, can add to it as you want, and can move it to a different hosting company if you want.

As far as hosting, Hostinger is pretty good. So is Hostgator. There are a lot of companies that require you do use their other produsts, etc, to host there. Many people who have been at this a while say to avoid any hosting company owned, or recently acquired by Endurance International Group. They buy successful hosting firms, and then perform what is commonly called deferred maintenance, so the downtime increases from what it was before they owned it. AWS is very popular, and a decent product. But with the smaller hosting companies you can get someone on the phone when you have issues with the hosting side of the site. I would say not to get the cheapest hosting package offered by a company, at Hostinger it's $2.49 a month. The second one, which does offer more features for an ecommerce site, is a whopping $1.20 a month more.
So once you have your site, which, from your description of what you want, should be less than $400 to set up, installed on the host, with shipping and payment modules in place and working, you will likely spend less than $10 a month to be up and selling. And if you get another wild hair, or several, you can host an additional 99 websites on the same hosting account.

Before you commit to a platform, you can set up a virtual server, download and install woocommerce and other ecommerce platforms, and play with them, to see if you want to set one up by yourself.

My advice is a couple of decades out of date.
When I was playing around with hosting websites at around the turn of the century, you would get a selection of base websites from the service provider. The one i chose had a shop plugin. Which had some other plugins for payment.
Maybe check what service providers like Godaddy, and similar, have to offer these days.

Many YooTub video influencers I watch are sponsored by Squarespace. Which is similar to what you are asking for.

Thanks for all of that info Motovista.

Thanks. I will pass along your compliments to her.

Companies like Etsy, Ebay and Amazon each have their own policies, which may not sync up with how someone wants to operate their company. They do not exist so sellers make money, they exist so they make money. So they will constantly send you emails that you should lower your price, send people lower offers, etc. If you purchase something on any of them and then, three weeks later, break it, you can say that's how it arrived and ask for a refund and they will take the money back from the seller, no matter what the seller's policies are and what the buyer agreed to. If I was selling high end hand made ceramic pieces, I would require the buyer to make a claim for damages within 48 hours of receipt, for example. Most of these companies don't care if that is your policy. If the customer drops it and asks for a refund within 30 days, or bought it to use for a party and had no intention of keeping it, you're eating it.
Now I might use Etsy to drive traffic to my own website, by listing something in such a way that the customer could easily find your own site, and see that you have other items available. And I would mark up the item enough on Etsy that the customer could see a difference between the price there and on your own website, then put your own information in every package sent out that was sold on Etsy. Amazon strongly discourages sellers from charging a lower price on their own website, and other companies have similar policies.

I've not done it, but I know a couple of people who have - get a Wise business account, and get paid via an email address or phone number for your goods. This can be worldwide, as Wise will convert just about any currency for you at the mid-market rate for a small fee. No 'hidden' fees, and no horrible Paypal/Whoever fees.

https://wise.com/gb/blog/receive-with-email-address

"Receive money in any currency — with just your email address"

Simple, easy, cheap...

https://www.bigcartel.com/

However, a website is like a Lemonade stand, if nobody sees it, nobody buys it. It is all about Google Ads.

I work for a Web Development company and have 30 years experience making websites.

For mass consumer items, yes. Instagram (and its ilk) have changed the script for niche market artists in the last few years.

Woocommerce, easy to set up, integrates well with PayPal and Stripe will let you take pretty much all forms of payment. I like Stripe. Use one of the WooCommerce. Pretty easy to customize, plenty of themes and extension. Much easier than Magneto and other carts I've used. I put one together for the Scootin My Way t-shirts and even having been away from web design/dev since I retired in 2016 I had little trouble getting it up and running. I changed hosts and since then have had gateway issues but since I only put up the site for friends who wanted a few thing I never bothered to fix payment what broke in the sit move on the security certificate.

Another SaaS site, Similar to Shopify, Adobe commerce (was Magento), etc. They own it, not you. They can sell the company, delete your site, raise your rates once you've got your site up and running, with all your products loaded on, stick you on the slowest server they own, go out of business, etc. With a woocommerce, oscommerce or zencart site, for example, you own all the files for your site, and can install it on any hosting you want. So if your current hosting starts having downtime issues, you can be somewhere else tomorrow. And the customers won't be confused or gone because your site is different, or the links to the old site don't redirect to the new one. It's your site and you can host it wherever you want.
A little less than 30% of all ecommerce sites are Woocommerce sites, including several 1 billion plus companies. If your company is worth more than a billion dollars, you likely aren't on Woocommerce only because it's cheaper than Shopify. A lot of managed hosting companies will load a woocommerce onto your hosting account for free.
Cheryl's site https://scootinmyway.com/ is probably a better example of why woocommerce is the best option out there now, than anything I or others have pointed out. The software was free, it looks and works like a real ecommerce site, because it is a real freestanding ecommerce site, and she has complete control over how it looks and where it is hosted.

Me and others I know have been using BigCartel for years and have not run into any of the issues have been mentioned at all. Same with the other services you mentioned too. I have used many. It is what I do for a living. That is not to say that the issues you mention did not occur, just that I have never run into any of these problems, ever.

Probably more the exception than the rule. All of these services have clearly defined pricing. You want more, you pay more. I believe that is normal, here on Earth. Big Cartel is free for only a few items I believe. there are others as well, I just have the most personal experience with them. I am currently only selling with e-bay.

I am also an authorized Big Commerce E-Commerce re-seller and am very familiar with the larger solutions. One of my Big Commerce sites is currently bringing in over a half a millon in sales yearly. No, that aint free and they spend $500 a day on Google Ads and average $2500 a day in orders... https://www.upc-bottles.com/

A person can set up a totally free e-commerce link using PayPal as well. It all depends on what you want and what you want to pay for.

So I have created 4 test sites using Woo, Big Cartel, and GoDaddy. I keep my domains at GoDaddy so it was logical to try them.

GoDaddy: Antiquated interface but not terrible. The AI generated product descriptions are sometimes rather commical. It autogenerates a sample site based on your answers to some questions and it turned out a bit busy. Wife wants a clean and simple UI.

Big Cartel: Limited numbers of themes but they do have some clean ones. Wife liked this one and the tools, while limited, are pretty easy to figure out. It also allows access to code. Just the basic needs and the price is the best.

WooCommerce: Wordpress plug in. Needs a host. Has a nice design interface with lots of options.

Of the three Big Cartel is first mainly do to it's ease of use and lower cost. The business will more of a hobby business anyway so this should work out best for Mrs. stickyfrog. I may check out a few more but probably not the more costly ones.

Thanks for all of your input ladies and gentlemen.