Welcome to Part 4 of our “Best DIY Websites” series! If you plan on using your website to sell products directly, this article is for you! While it might seem daunting at first, especially as a beginner in web design, adding a shop to your site is something that our Weebly Drag & Drop Site Builder makes easy. And we’ve made it even easier by giving you step-by-step instructions. If you’ve chosen a different website builder, there’s still value in reading the steps below as many of the tools out there follow a similar process. So without further ado, here’s how you add a shop to your website:

Adding Your Shop Page

In the Weebly Website Builder, click on Pages in the main menu.

Move your cursor to the tools on the left side of the page and click on the + to add a new page.

Select Store Page and name your page. “Store” and “Shop” are both good options. Simply choose whichever you feel sounds more accurate for what you want your customers to do and see. Click on Save.

The website builder will put the new Store page as the last page in your menu. You can click and drag it to adjust the order. If selling products is your websites top priority, you’ll likely want to keep it toward the top of your navigation options.

Quick Tip: Whenever you’re given the option to “Save” along the way, do so! It never hurts and by clicking it often, you can be confident in experimenting within the tool, knowing you won’t lose any of your settings or designs.

Adding Your Shop Products

1. Click on “Store” in the top menu (or Shop if you chose Shop), then on “Products” in the new left menu that appears. Then click on “Add Product” in the top right corner of the page.

2. Now fill out the Add Product form.

The options you have are:

• Product name – What you type here will be exactly what appears on your website, so name your products wisely. Quick Tip: Think about SEO when naming your products and consider using keywords.
• Short description – Like in our tip above, think about SEO here too, but also what might help your visitor make buy this product compared to a competitor’s or compared to others in your shop.
• Product type – This is a simple categorization of your products. The options are “physical good”, “service” or a “digital” – pick whichever is most accurate.
• Product images – The visual display of your product is the most important element, so try to choose clean, professional images that look as close to the real product your customer will receive as possible. You can add multiple images, so consider 3-4 (but not too many) that show off different angles or features of that product.
• Price – This is where you include the normal price of the product. Quick Tip: Use clean, rounded numbers for your prices that don’t end with random cents.
• Sale price – This is an optional field that allows you to clearly indicate any reduced prices you might have on products or any sales you might be running
• SKU – This stands for “Stock Keeping Unit” and assigning products a SKU is a way of identifying and cataloging each product. Don’t let it’s technical term scare you or make you feel pressured to include one. It’s an optional setting.
• Weight – This is also an optional setting. We really only recommend including if if the product is unusually heavy or if the weight of it will surprise a customer upon delivery
• Product permalink – This is another optional setting that gives you the opportunity to customize the web address or URL of each product if you want to (which are otherwise automatically generated). It references the section in the address that you’ll see after the / in a web address, such as www.yourwebsite.com/your-product
  Quick Tip: We recommend using product permalinks for products that have especially long names
  
• Track inventory – This section allows you to enter the quantity of a product you have for sale to prevent customers buying something that is out of stock.
  Quick tip: Keep your product pages up-to-date at all times, and be sure to update your track inventory as you begin to run out of specific products. It might even give customers an extra push to purchase!
• Charge sales tax – You can set the sales tax rate in the settings of your store here so you can maintain transparency with customers about how much they’ll actually be charged for purchasing a product

In addition to these standard settings you can add Advanced Options (for SEO page titles and descriptions) and Multiple Options (to add things like size or color if your customers have multiple options when purchasing a particular product). Multiple options mean you only have to create one product listing instead of a separate one for each product, which can be a clean and organized way to sell your products if they’re all nearly the same with the exception of things like color or pattern.

The two final options are:

• Hide – This is how you can keep a product listing on your website, but hide it from your customer’s sight. This is useful if you have a product that is temporarily out of stock.
• Show in storefront – The Storefront is the main page of your store. This option lets you choose which products appear on that page. Quick Tip: We recommend choosing the most popular, best-selling items in your shop for this page.

Other Essential Settings

You can change a number of other settings for your shop, such as the order that products appear on your Storefront, categories in which each product lives, and coupons to apply for discounts. These are all things that will help you improve your store once it’s up and running, but there are a few other essentials to consider with your shop before going live:

To get to these essential options, click on “Settings” in the left menu.

Once you’ve landed on that page, these are the settings you should check and consider:

• Store Settings – This is essential for the vast majority of shops. In this option you can change the currency and weight unit, plus add or change the address and contact details of your store. You should also add return and shipping policies in this section.

• Checkout – This is another essential element that must be set up for an online shop to operate successfully, as it sets up the merchant service that will process payments made to your store. For example, you can use Stripe or PayPal.

• Display – This section is all about the appearance of your store. So you’ll want to check out your options and decide upon something that feels relevant and reflective of your offerings

• Shipping – If you sell physical products in your store, this is where you enter the shipping details pertinent to your customers

• Taxes – This is where you can add sales taxes applicable to the products your selling.

• Emails – This is the final essential element. It allows you to check and change the emails sent when a customer interacts with your store. This includes order confirmation emails, shipped emails and refund emails.

• Advanced – This optional setting allows you to add a Google Analytics Tracking ID to your store so you can get statistics on the people who visit. Not familiar with Google Analytics? Keep an eye out in the future for an article with tips and tricks for small business beginners.

It’s entirely up to you how you want to make your store. But with Weebly and iPage, you can do it all without any previous technical knowledge or programming abilities. So if you haven’t already, go check it out! And sell, sell, sell!

Happy shopping!

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save