Start Selling Online – GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart
Can non-technical marketers actually set up a search optimized web site, complete with blogs, credit card processing, email marketing, and analytics all by themselves and begin selling products in a matter of hours?
Yes.
GoDaddy has created a series of integrated tools that allow you to literally do everything in a matter of hours and begin selling online. I used this platform to create a proof-of-concept platform and within 120 days had sales in excess of $20,000 a month.
I am going to show you how to navigate the system, and a few tips I learned along the way. The GoDaddy platform is an excellent way to start for a new site, and I found the customer service to be very responsive and knowledgeable.
With the GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart, you can create and publish a stand-alone Internet store or add one to your existing Web site in a matter of minutes. Accept PayPal® and credit cards, offer multiple shipping options, issue coupons – all via your secure site. And there’s NO “percentage of sales” fee like with other instant online stores (such as Yahoo).
How To Start Selling Online with GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart
Step One: Choose a domain name and the plan you need – they have three different versions of Quick Shopping Cart and it really comes down to how many products you plan to list. They all have plenty of disk space and bandwidth. Once you do this, you will go into a wizard driven utility that lets you set up the store (this is for beginners, or for a quick and dirty proof of concept. Advanced users just click on the “Advanced” tab to get to more detail, HTML and CSS).
Step Two: Storefront Information Basic contact information, an image of your company logo and a contact e-mail address.
Step Three: Product Catalog. This is where you will spend most of your time in building your storefront. List all of your products, product categories/departments, pictures of your products, and some marketing copy describing each product. You can import a data file here, and there is seamless integration with eBay if you plan to sell via that channel as well.
Step Four: Design your site. There are over 40 store templates to choose from, and you get more opportunities to modify the color, font, product page layout etc as you go through the wizard. You wont find any Web 2.0 designs here – they are basic, and effective. Give some thought to how you want your storefront to look on the Internet and how products should be displayed. You will also have the option to create linkages between products, such as popular add-ons or related items.
Step Five: Taxes and Shipping. Apply the tax rate applicable for your state. Shipping can be set to UPS, USPS, or a custom setting (no Fed Ex integration). If you don’t have a UPS account, you can quickly register or continue without an account.
Step Six: Payment options. You can accept PayPal right out of the gate. If you don’t have a PayPal account, you can apply for one here. If you want to accept credit cards directly and not via PayPal, you will need your merchant payment gateway account information. Again, if you don’t have a payment gateway established, you can sign up for one here. PayPal is pretty quick to set up, a merchant account requires an SSL certificate and will take a week or so to set up. But you can still start selling today and accept cards via PayPal. I used the QuickBooks Merchant Services which is integrated with the Quick Shopping Cart. It worked well, gave excellent “potential fraud” warnings, and has a great user interface. They also have an introductory offer which makes it inexpensive to set up. I would like to see Google CheckOut as an option here, but that’s not a show stopper as PayPal is more widely known and used.
Step Seven: Publish. Here you preview your site and go live on the web and start selling!
So far this is all pretty painless and straightforward. It’s the next level of integration that I like. Within the tool you can set up a Google Base feed (also known as Froogle) to get more exposure. And by adding a few other products like Traffic Blazer and Express E-mail Marketing you can get your advertising set up and begin working with customer lists. The Quick Shopping Cart is fully integrated with both of these packages, so when you start marketing to your current customers all the data is in your CAN-SPAM compliant tool. Makes life much easier so you dont have to import lists, etc. Same goes for the Quick Blog which helps promote your site and is good for SEO rankings.
The interface is pretty clean and easy to use. When ever I called GoDaddy customer support they were always helpful and knew what I was going through.
Check out the videos and tutorials on the GoDaddy site to get a better idea of how easy it is to set up a real online store in just a couple of hours.
[…] but you must maintain it monthly as all listings expire after 31 days. See my reviews on the GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart and Volusion’s e-commerce platforms as both of these make it easy to use Google Product […]
Enoyed your post and bookmarked you for future reading.. Thinking of adding some of your content to my website ZestforMarketing
[…] but you must maintain it monthly as all listings expire after 31 days. See my reviews on the GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart and Volusion’s e-commerce platforms as both of these make it easy to use Google Product […]
This is just awsome. I’ll have to do a write up on it.
Hi, I want to instert goolge analytics code into my qsc, but seems no not work.