Problem:
There are certainly websites devoted to the task of selling single items online; eBay, craigslist, and Facebook Marketplace, Amazon. The problem with those sites is, I feel those sites put the items I have for sale in a bit of “havoc”. With expiration dates, listing fees, final value fees, or supposed listing infractions for listing something that an algorithm deems inappropriate, I feel as though the control of the items I wish to sell needs a more stable home.
Risk:
I certainly realize taking my items to some other “channel” may cause me to decrease my audience.
Also, posting items to multiple locations will attention in the management of inventory.
Options?:
Today on ScreencastsOnline, I watched a tutorial by @RosemaryOrchard on the Micro.Blog service. As I watched the tutorial, I thought that service appeared to be better version of Tumblr.
With my goal of selling items, quantity of one (maybe two or three, at most), I thought perhaps a blogging service could give me the control I desire.
Are there other blogging platforms or, ecommerce platforms, that would be suited for this job?
For that I would recommend WordPress and Woocommerce. You can set it up to calculate shipping and so on for you, which saves a lot of work!
The WooCommerce integration with Wordpress is pretty solid. (I don’t know how it is outside of Wordpress though.) A friend set up a shop quickly using it, and chose against Shopify for technical and other reasons.
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chose against Shopify for technical and other reasons
Holy hell. Thanks for linking to that. There’s no way I’m ever going to approach it either.
Wow! I appreciate all the input on this topic. Thank you, @RosemaryOrchard, @SpivR, @bowline, and @anon85228692 for contributing, thus far.
With that said, some additional thoughts about finding a solution:
- Keep cost low.
- Keep the time investment low. Wordpress, I believe and based on @SpivR’s comment, requires an investment of time to just learn that system alone.
- Micro.blog seems to be “craigslist simple”. Very low barrier regarding experience/knowledge.
- I prefer to just hash out shipping fees with a customer directly. It takes minimal effort, in my opinion.
From my experience of close to a year selling off personal effects, Facebook seems to bring in the most attention to my items. I think the biggest hurdle in local online sales is finding the biggest audience for your items. I would not discount craigslist at all, though. It definitely brings in interest.
Somewhat related question:
@RosemaryOrchard - Do you know, off hand, does Micro.blog allow a user to restrict the visibility of an individual blog post such that only the author can view their own post, or the post is public, or the post may have visibility to only those who have access to the URL?
micro.blog is a social network as much as it is a CMS. You can’t lock down your site to stop other people viewing it. I feel that it’s really not the right solution for what you’re looking for here.