E-commerce is for everyone

During my career on e-commerce I have collaborated with clients of different sizes, from the big retailer that earns millions of dollars per month, to the well-known brand with a small shop in the internet that sells a couple of thousands dollars a month. My last collaboration was a small store. Really small store. This got me wondering lately if it is possible to set up a store in the internet, as a regular person selling goods or services.

Clothing store that could be selling over the internet, as far as we know.

I am a believer that this is true: e-commerce is for everyone. There are a lot of platforms that any person who wants to sale can go to and start selling on the same day.* Not technical skills required, just the learning curve of the platform. But also, there are some alternatives that makes e-commerce accesible to everybody that does not depend on a third party platform.

From my latest collaboration on a small store, we helped setting up the store on a platform called Magento. This platform has a Community Edition. That means that is open and accessible for everyone who wants to use it. Setting up a store in Magento is not as easy as might be setting up a store in Etsy, but is doable. I think that tech skills are not required, but it helps a lot to understand what is needed and how to do it.

So, imagine you have your .com or .us or .net store instead of your www.etsy.com/ store. That opens a world of possibilities, from how your store looks like to what you are able to sell in your store or the number of products you can list.

Over the next entries, me and some of my peers, will tell you what we did to set up the store in Magento, how we have applied in a small store what we already know from big stores and what are the nice to have things that would.

*This is what Etsy says on their sell page.