eCommerce, Everywhere

An online store? No thanks. I’ll just post a picture.

Ever tried to setup an online store? Rather daunting little task, isn’t it? Every major eCommerce CMS is complex and confusing at best, from the newer and simpler solutions like the WordPress powered WooCommerce all the way to full-fledged eCommerce engines like Magento. You can use them to make your own store, but you’ll sure find it frustrating at best to get everything to look and work the way you want. And don’t even talk about hand-coding your own eCommerce system from scratch without at least using a payment solution, unless you really know you can make a fully secure and PCI compliant.

Really, just scratch building your own online store by hand unless you’re really dedicated to the tech side of things. Just make a store on a hosted platform like Shopify or Big Cartel, places that make it easy for sell stuff online for a few dollars a month. You’ll get your own site to tweak as you like, within reason, and it should just work. That’s a ton simpler.

But even that’s likely too much trouble if you’re really not geeky. I mean, you just want to sell stuff: why have to go to this much trouble? So instead, just list your items on eBay and Etsy. There’s a built-in audience at those sites looking for things, so you’re more likely to get discovered anyhow. Seriously.

Wait. Is discovery the magic word? In that case, you might not even want a store at all. Just think for 3 seconds about where you discover stuff at random the most online, and you’re ready to sell.

Apparently, that’s what entrepreneuring farmers in Kuwait did, when they decided to start selling their sheep on Instagram. No, really. It sounds insane, but as Quartz reported, farmers there are taking pictures of their livestock, adding the price and their phone number or WhatsApp messaging ID to the photos, and then posting them on Instagram. Voilà. Without doing anything more than simple photography and editing, they got a full eCommerce store that looks sharp and automatically broadcasts their new products to their customers. What more could you ask for?

Maybe we all think too hard

Backtrack several months, and my wife was trying to start an online business, selling handmade natural paper and more. She’d sold stuff on eBay years ago, but the fees and frustrations with eBay’s interface and policies made her want to try something new. So, I suggested we just make an eCommerce site and sell directly.

Easier said than done. WooCommerce proved rather frustrating, and the whole website project turned out harder than I would have thought at first. But once you have a site done, how are you going to attract buyers? You can try to get to the top of Google for the things you’re selling, but that’s tough at best — and still, how many people are going to buy stuff directly from a site they just stumbled across from a Google search? For her, eBay became the solution again. It’s filled with people looking for stuff to buy, and if you can put up with their insanely dated interface and listing tools and make enough to scrape together a profit after paying all of their fees, it’s rather simple to make your store a quick mini-success.

Discovery is the crucial element. If people don’t see what you’re selling, you’re out of luck. eBay fit the need by bringing potential customers and sellers together in one place that most people online think to look for stuff. But social networks are even better. Facebook and Twitter are where most people’s attention are these days. So why not sell stuff directly to where people already are?

As it turns out, Facebook eCommerce is already popular in Thailand in much the same way Instagram eCommerce is in Kuwait, but I never thought of it as such. There’s stores here that sell everything from furniture to iPhone cases without more than a Facebook Fan page. They’ll post pictures of their products, and leave more info about them and their prices and shipping policies in the description. If you want to buy anything, you can call them or send them a private message on Facebook, and complete the purchase with a bank transfer. There’s an element of trust since you can see the store’s fans talking in the comments on Facebook, and you know you could raise a ruckus if they didn’t deliver. But they do: eCommerce really works this way.

You’ll still have to build up a fan base, and you’ll still have to make great products. But processing payments and getting a web presence doesn’t have to be nearly as difficult as most of us think. You really just need to tell people the stuff’s for sell, and there’s likely really low-tech options for everything else.

No wonder Instagram sold for $1 billion.

Originally published on August 20th, 2013 in Techinch Magazine Issue 4

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