Kelly is a friend of mine who a year ago set up Popadoodledoo, a business selling cake pops. She started off with word of mouth sales, now sells on markets in the Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire areas. Having seen a growing number of sales from her Facebook page, she recently decided that it was time to get a website.
Having looked at a number of website solutions, Kelly settled on Wix. She decided on Wix because it’s cost effective and more importantly is easy to design with a drag and drop editor. Wix also provide a mobile optimised version of your new website at no extra cost.
It’s worth thinking about the costs when you’re looking for your first website. There are plenty of free or low cost packages available, but if you’re not a website designer then you either need to pay a developer or you need to choose a package which enables you to create the website without needing to learn how to code.
Kelly’s website was put together in a couple of hours in a single evening. Wix makes it easy with a raft of templates to choose from* which can be customised in an HTML5 interface. Wix also have an app center with free and paid for apps for social, forms, ecommerce, images and marketing tools. The ecommerce tools include connectors for Shopify and Etsy if you already use either of those sites.
WixStores which comes with the Wix Ecommerce Package was more than good enough for Kelly, although if you’re selling on marketplaces there don’t appear to be marketplace connectors for eBay or Amazon so you’ll need to add your products manually.
There appear always to be some special offers for Wix. The headline price appears to be £15.56 per month for the Wix Ecommerce Package, although currently that’s discounted to £10.10 per month if you pay annually. Kelly was lucky as a 50% discount coupon appeared on her account reducing the cost to £5.05 per month (£72.75 inc VAT for the first year).
There are a number of payment options of which the simplest and quickest to set up is PayPal, you simply add your PayPal email address into the WixStores management console and that’s it done.
As Kelly already owns her URL, it was simply a matter of instructing the registrar to point the DNS server to Wix’s servers. If you’re buying your URL through Wix (they include a free domain registration), then you won’t have to wait for DNS servers to update.
Currently the Popadoodledoo site is set up and all Kelly needs to do is to add more products. (At the time of writing there are only two in her shop but it won’t take her long to add more).
If you’re looking for a website and don’t need a marketplace connector, then Wix is well worth considering. Anyone with some basic word processing skills and able to drag and drop will find it relatively simple to get going and a Wix website has worked out as a pretty low cost solution for a first website.
* If you’re wondering, Kelly customised the Gymnastics School theme which was free in the Wix directory.
2 Responses
I have javascript blocked by default on my browser when I am surfing using Chrome,and use Noscript on firefox.
The cake website highlighted above, simply results in a blank page when visiting, and of course when javascript was enabled, the annoying scrolling gallery loaded, along with the rest of the site.
Although people who surf the internet my way are likely to be in a minority- I would still like to see all websites have basic functionality when javascript is disabled, and not display a blank page.