Episode 5: Ecommerce Website Design Brisbane
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[00:00:00] Saul: Hi everybody and welcome to the web design has been podcast This is episode number five. Today's episode is entitled Ecommerce Website Design Brisbane. My name is Saul Edmond's and as usual, I'm joined by the lovely Gillian Smith.
[00:00:15] Gillian: Good morning, Saul and hello, everybody.
[00:00:17] Saul: Hi, everyone. We are the co-founders and creative directors of brand has the creative agency, a local business with a passion for helping our clients grow. Over to you, Joe.
[00:00:26] Gillian: Okay, well, today we'll talk about Ecommerce Website Design, and we'll ask the question, what are the best ecommerce website platforms. Now our goal is to help small business owners’ start-ups and entrepreneurs in the city of Brisbane, Australia, take their opportunities to the next level with brilliant website design. If you're from another location of city, welcome, thanks for joining us today and we hope that we can help you grow your business in the on the in the online space.
[00:00:53] Saul: Okay, so what are some of today's topics, Gill?
[00:00:56] Gillian: Well, we're going to focus on e commerce with website design. Now, if you're getting started with e commerce, first step is to choose a platform. So today we'll start with an overview of the most popular ecommerce platforms out there today and look at which are the best ecommerce platforms for small business and how you can choose the best platform for you to meet your business goals. Okay, let's get started. Okay, well, so what are the most popular ecommerce platforms available today?
[00:01:24] Saul: Okay, well, some of the most popular ones. There's a much bigger list, but this is the ones that I guess, most people would identify as the most popular ones. You've got Magenta, Shopify, Press the shop, Big commerce, Drupal, Open cart, WooCommerce, as a part of WordPress and Squarespace, which Squarespace is, I guess, still a relatively new player in the world, but not in terms of being around but in terms of the e commerce features that you now offered for a number of years, which are really great.
[00:02:02] Gillian: So among these ones, which are the top one commerce platforms, if you are getting started?
[00:02:09] Saul: So if you are getting started, I think most people, even people who haven't got a lot of experience have heard of WordPress, so when they may not have heard of WooCommerce. WooCommerce used to be a plugin purely for WordPress and in one sense, it still is, but it's now the primary e commerce platform that's used within WordPress as a website platform to edit and create sites, and so forth. And it's probably in many ways, the most flexible, but then you've got things like magenta, which have been around for a very long time. And it's got a number of very advanced features, not nowhere near as user friendly, as something like woo commerce, WordPress, or especially Squarespace. Then Squarespace and big commerce and Shopify has three examples. There are three examples of website design platforms, but ones that that have really good ecommerce elements to them, which are self-hosted so what that means is, they manage everything, you have a subscription each month to them or yearly, and you get a particular service there, everything is built within them, including their hosting, which means that you can't then say, migrate or take a Shopify store and bring it over to another platform. They do everything for you, which has its own set of advantages to in that for security, and then managing everything but then you don't have to look after so for a lot of people, that's a great introductory option.
[00:04:03] Gillian: Saul, in a nutshell, why do you specifically recommend Shopify ecommerce, and Squarespace for people getting started? Like, what are the key benefits that particular platforms offer?
[00:04:13] Saul: Well, if you are going to say, like somebody who, who wants to do their own site, regardless of whether they're going to come to an agency like us, or somebody else, and help them build something on this platform, or do it themselves for the long term, ecommerce, I would say more than your average website, where you've got information that most people wouldn't have to change that regularly, and ecommerce store isn't going to be like that. A lot of the time, you're going to be looking at orders, you're going to be modifying content, you're going to be adding coupon code, changing pricing, new products, new sales, things that have so what that, it's much more truly alive and changing than a lot of sites. So really important point there is that I feel that users who with an e commerce store, need to have a real like an even better handle on editing the store and feeling comfortable. So that's why these really, I think they originated in the first place. They've been around for a long time, but they came about as a result of a need for your average user to have an easy experience that they don't need to know coding or they don't need to know anything like that. But they still have very advanced features to them as well.
[00:05:44] Gillian: Okay, so we're talking about Shopify, WooCommerce and Squarespace. Now how do these platforms differ from each other now? Why would you choose Shopify and Squarespace for example or vice versa? How do you make a decision?
[00:05:57] Saul: Okay, so the first thing is, if somebody is going to be a single deal breaker for some people, if somebody says I want to income this website, I want to put it on my own hosting, they can't have Squarespace or Shopify, because they've got their own deal so if that's going to be a must have, then they're going to have to eliminate that straightaway. And you're going to go over to WooCommerce inside WordPress.
[00:06:24] Saul: Now, WordPress, if I was going to say, which platform has, well, there's no such thing as a solid being future proof because things are changing all the time but if you were going to have something that had the most flexibility, and there was a bunch of stuff you didn't know that you wanted, but you wanted to have flexibility for to have that I would go to work almost inside WordPress every single time because of one key thing that WordPress is an open source platform, which means that there's thousands, if not 10s of thousands or more of developers and people creating plugins for all the time.
[00:07:14] Saul: And there's a huge array of options there for people to choose from, some are better than others. But ultimately, there's really fantastic solutions for people, Shopify and Squarespace in their own merits, probably even more so with Squarespace is incredibly easy for people to use so as a great entry point, even if they end up moving over for as things expand, and they need more options that aren't available in something like Shopify or Squarespace, a really great starting point for a lot of people is to get a Shopify store, and a Squarespace store, they can start themselves they can become really familiar, might end up being what they stay with their whole life. Shopify has got a whole array of like login Squarespace of really great existing templates that you can completely customize within certain limits, but the highly flexible, and Shopify has got a range of different add ons to that you can just add certain features or you can buy more premium themes. So themes, design themes, we are going to establish, look and feel that then you can often customize yourself anyway, common to all of these things. So all every single one we've talked about now, and along with all the other ones, including Big commerce, Press the show, Magenta, Drupal, all of them, to some extent, have the concept of things, we've got a starting point. And then if you need or, if you need the more customized from scratch, that's where you come to a design to work that out for you and then to assist.
[00:09:12] Gillian: So how easy is it to DIY your own ecommerce store?
[00:09:17] Saul: It's pretty easy, it's pretty, it's made a lot easier than ever before you can get on sign up. You've got other services like wicks, as well, which we haven't mentioned, but is a fairly big player to similar sort of setup, it's fairly easy for people to get going. There's only certain things that when they that people don't always realize that they need particular things until they get into the thick of it, and then that's often sometimes when they call a developer or designer to help out.
[00:09:21] Gillian: So, someone is made the decision that they want to however, work with the professional design team for their ecommerce solution. What's the price guide? Can you give people for starting out different ecommerce websites?
[00:10:09] Saul: Well, that's a little bit of the answer to that is how long is a piece of string, which everyone's quite familiar with that with that phrase. So, in an ecommerce site sometimes depends on the amount of products. So everyone would probably readily realize that a site that someone has got one product is going to be less overall than any ecommerce store that got 10,000 products, some of that is, is due to particular functionality that needs to be created, which then the more complex that is, you would go over to something like with commerce in WordPress, because of what I said before the availability of over all of the different sorts of opportunities you have. And also, which I didn't mentioned before, that you can create your own plugins from scratch to suit exactly what you want to do. So that's a huge plus. Anything starting from like, three to 4000 and upwards for ecommerce store that's at the very base kind of level for very small stores, and then up from there, or depending on what you want to do.
[00:11:30] Gillian: So, my last question here, Saul. What have you got to say about selling on Facebook?
[00:11:35] Saul: Selling on Facebook? Well, once again, if you get back to the point of who your target market is, too, so if any platform has its own merits selling on Facebook may be highly appropriate if your audience largely resides on Facebook, even if they don't know having not right, always necessarily say that, the more opportunities you have to sell at various locations online, the more likely you are to make money. That's not necessarily true. But if you identify that your audience is residing on Facebook, you don't have the same set of options. The only downside I would say there is that while she can actually integrate some of your ecommerce platforms into Facebook, your options for how you do that, how it looks, the experience that you have is very limited on Facebook. But if that's as an add on to your other platforms, I think it can be a great option as well.
[00:12:56] Saul: Okay, guys, that's it for today. Before we go though, please don't forget to write, review and subscribe to this podcast. We'd love to hear your feedback. We're on a journey to help local Brisbane businesses grow their opportunities online and exceed their goals. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you tomorrow.
[00:13:15] Gillian: Bye.