Thinking about opening a web store, looking for advice
I am mulling over starting a side business that would involve selling physical products. I would like to set up a web store for this, but want to keep the amount of web development I have to do to a minimum. I would also not like to invade my customers' and potential customers' privacy. Can anyone recommend a way to approach this? I'm a software developer, but don't do much web development and don't really want to do development for this project beyond just getting the site up and running. What options exist for setting up a simple web store?
I've done a search and see things like Shopify. I've heard of them and get the impression they're reputable, but other items in my search seemed kind of scammy. Are there things I should look out for in this space?
Etsy? I know it's a thing, but if you are creating these items yourself, it might be something to look into.
Duh! I didn't even think of that. Thank you! That's actually a really good idea.
It depends on a number of things, including how much back end management you want to do, your plans for product marketing and discoverability, and how much you're willing to spend. Etsy is among the easiest, but they're on a multi-year quest to discover exactly how much of a margin they can take before they move from milking their cash cow to killing the golden goose. Something like Shopify will provide a backend for a much lower cost, but it won't provide any way for people to find what you're selling. To be able to make a good choice here there's a number of questions you'll want to answer:
Separate from specifics of your web store, if you're starting a business, think about how much admin time it'll take to manage. Beyond the manufacturing, who's going to be handling the bookkeeping, the shipping and receiving, the governmental filings? Almost certainly it's going to be you doing all of those things, so bake into your estimates a good chunk of time to maintain the business itself. Once you've done that, make sure that the profits you make from selling the stuff pays you for the admin time and costs as well. It's easy to feel like because the sale price is better than the cost to manufacture that you're fine, but it's important to bake in the admin costs, an extra margin for reinvestment in the business, your own financial needs, etc.
Business owners are often really dedicated to their business, but their business needs to reward them for that dedication. Otherwise they're spending a decade putting everything they have into a marginally self-sustaining business and losing out on anything resembling a chance at retirement.
Well, this went a little far afield. I work with small businesses and their owners on operations and finance, so I've seen a lot of businesses over the years. The shooting stars, the grinding failures, and the self-sustaining. If you have other questions about business ownership or management, feel free to ask here or shoot me a DM.
Thanks so much for the advice! I have owned a reasonably successful business before. (It survived past the 5 year mark.) I agree with everything you've said here. I'm still figuring out all of the things you asked about, and figuring out how I can take people's money is one step in that journey. I figure if either I can't get that up and running, or if just doing that is going to cost too much, I shouldn't even start down this road. So I'm still very much in the planning stages.
I'd say that Etsy is the absolute easiest place to start, then. You can always make other choices later, but for ease of startup it's really hard to beat.