Which is better for the e-commerce beginner?
If you’ve decided to sell products online you’ll quickly find that you have choices to make. Do you sell on Amazon or your own store? And if your own store, do you use Shopify (perhaps the best known e-commerce platform) or newcomer Groovekart? Let’s compare!
Better than Amazon?
Whilst selling on Amazon might guarantee you an audience, you’d be up against some very stiff competition. and, unless you’re selling something truly unique or can sell cheaper than anyone else it can be difficult to stand out.
For that reason many people choose to set up their own site – to showcase their own products, build a brand and set up a business of their own. Up until recently there were only a few options for doing that, with Shopify being the clear leader.
Recently however there’s a newcomer on the block – with a very well known and well established backer – and what’s more it’s FREE!
So when it comes to the crunch which is better – Shopify or Groovekart?
Let’s look at what you need when you’re setting up and how the two compare:
What does it cost?
After an initial 14 day free trial, maintaining a Shopify store will set you back between $29 and $299 a month. That means that, even if you’ve only got the basic Shopify account you’ve got to be reasonably confident that you can make at least $29 in profit.
By contrast Groovekart is free – not for a trial period, but forever. That means you can get set up, test the software and find out if your product will really sell. If you’ve not entirely decided on your product yet you can even set up more than one store (on the free version you are limited to setting up one additional store per month. With an upgrade you can set up more) so you could try out more than one idea if you chose to.
Winner: Groovekart
But “Cheap” doesn’t necessarily mean easy to use – so how do the platforms compare on that basis?
How easy is it to set up a store?
Both Shopify and Groovekart are fairly easy to set up, having both been designed specifically for e-commerce. Both allow you to set up your own products, integrate with stripe or paypal so as to get paid and to download images of your products. Shopify has a greater range of apps available, but Groovekart has the essential apps already built in
Winner: draw
Extras
Depending on the store that you’re setting up there are other things you’re likely to need – the ability to accept payment by credit card, on paypal is a given, as is checking on orders and stock. But what about the ability to personalise products (e.g. doing Print on Demand – allowing you to personalise goods to your customer’s designs)
Overall winner?
For making sales online Groovekart comes out on top. It doesn’t yet have the full functionality that Shopify has, but it is being developed with new features being created all the time. The killer features however are the fact that it
- Is free to use and
- comes with a built in “Clickfunnels” equivalent page and funnel builder that allows you build out a whole website (including video and images) and build a story around your site.
Don’t get me wrong – there are certainly plenty of advocates for Shopify and, as the more established brand it has certainly been tested more than Groove – but the ability to try Groove for free and to incorporate a whole ecosystem of products makes it the clear winner in this showdown.
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