Homestead Blog

In this post, Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, discusses options for selling products on the internet. - Rochelle

You’ve probably noticed that a lot of people are selling their stuff on the internet these days. What you probably don’t know is how easy it is to join them, no matter what your level of interest is. You can just sell a few things you’d like to get rid of, or have a hobby-type business on the side to sell consumer goods. You can even have a full-blown online store that you depend on for steady income. Whatever you’d like to do, there are some good solutions out there to help you sell goods worldwide over the web.

The quickest and easiest way to display your products and sell online is through existing websites like eBay or Craigslist. Craigslist is basically online classified advertising, and does not have any transaction capabilities built in. eBay offers many tools for sellers and buyers including PayPal integration, and the ability to track all your listings in your eBay dashboard.

Some of these sites have transaction fees, and require both the buyer and seller to have an account with them. You may not find the flexibility that you need to best describe your product or your business if you use one of these online services. And as easy as these sites are to use, one thing they can’t match is a branded shopping experience from your own personal Homestead website.

With Homestead, you have two options for selling stuff via your own website. Our Standard Website Packages come with our SiteBuilder tool, where you can add “Buy This” or “Add to Cart” buttons anywhere on any page in your website. You associate these buttons to your PayPal account, and your customers can buy your goods by paying you via PayPal. Once you receive payment notifications, you ship your goods to the customer on your own. You can manage your item list in SiteBuilder, but your transactions are subject to any fees that PayPal may charge. Once you have a PayPal account, setting this up in SiteBuilder is pretty quick and easy. We recommend this method for our customers who occasionally sell small volumes of items via their site, less than 10 items at a time for example.

For customers who sell more products on a regular or full-time basis we offer Homestead Storefront Packages. Storefront is a completely different product from our Website Packages, and it allows you to accept credit cards directly (with a merchant account) so your customers don’t have to use PayPal. Storefront also offers some very useful inventory management and shipping tools built right in. Storefront packages do not include access to SiteBuilder for building a standard website. Instead, Storefront walks you through a wizard where you choose a website design and layout, and then enter in all the products you are selling. The Storefront templates are customizable, but require a bit more time and technical expertise than SiteBuilder to really get a personalized look. We recommend one of our Storefront packages for people who sell many products at a time and consider their online store to be a regular business.

If you’d like some help deciding on the package you need, give us a call, we’d be glad to help!