Grandma Cooky was selling her homemade jams at the farmer’s market in 2012. They were delicious, and the locals loved them. But who new that this grandma would be selling her jams online in 2018. No, she didn’t expand her market stall into a large corporation, yet she does make plenty of money selling her jams regionally and even overseas.
You can visit Grandma Cooky’s store here. It’s a simple, homely site, but it also looks neat and modern. Have you ever seen a website like this before? What if we told you that Grandma Cooky is at the leading-edge of small business websites.
The online market stall
Grandma Cooky uses Shopify—an e-commerce platform that in just a few years has boomed to a size that no one can ignore. Last year the number of Shopify stores surpassed 500 thousand, and the stock prices on this company are booming.
But what is Shopify? And why is it booming?
Shopify is a service that lets you create your own online store. It is suited for large companies like Budweiser, but is so simple and easy-to-use that even the smallest companies can use it.
Shopify can be used as an addon to an existing website, and this allows any small business website to start selling products directly from the site.
Hopefully now you are starting to see how much of a game-changer Shopify is in the marketplace.
How a Shopified website is different from selling on Amazon or eBay for small businesses
Amazon and eBay started to change the game in the 1990s. They enabled every scarf-knitter, soap-maker and bismuth smelter to sell internationally. But, Amazon and eBay have a crucial difference to Shopify, that, as the 90s wore on, made it increasingly hard for small sellers to survive.
The difference is that Amazon and eBay are both centralised marketplaces, with all the products by all the sellers are side-by-side in a single location. The competition is fierce, and this makes it hard for small sellers to compete against the large companies that have come to dominate these platforms. When you search for jam on eBay, you will find reams of mass produced jam jars and factory wholesale jam products, but none of the farmer’s market-style jams sold by people like Grandma Cooky.
Hence why Shopify is booming. Hundreds of thousands of small sellers have realised that to get seen, they have to start their own shop, where they are the only ones in the spotlight.
But what about people finding the Shopify store in the first place? Yes,
But what about people finding the Shopify store in the first place?
It’s a matter of ranking highly on Google rather than ranking highly on eBay or Amazon. And it is actually a lot more do-able.
To get your products seen on eBay or Amazon, you need three main things: relevance, price and reputation. You need to have a title and description that matches what people are searching for (easy). But you also need to have a low price, and good ratings by customers. These last two things are dominated by companies that can mass produce and have low prices, and scores of good ratings.
Alternatively, ranking on Google is a game that the little guys can win. In regards to business websites, Google regards location as one of the key factors to ranking highly. Therefore, if you are a small business that wants to sell locally over the internet, then you should seriously consider Shopify. It will let you sell to a larger area, and get a new stream of sales, without competing with the large international sellers.
The way that small businesses can start seriously increasing their sales using Shopify is by selling reasonably locally over the internet. This is the future of eCommerce that Shopify is bringing forth. It is where people can easily find products that they want, just by searching in Google, rather than opening eBay or Amazon. And, it’s convenient for buyers because they still prefer buying locally, despite the internet. Shipping costs and 2 week to 2 month waits for deliveries from China are not always worth the small savings.
We are excited about Shopify, as it continues expanding rapidly and becoming—as some say—the next Amazon. It’s exciting because it is one of the ways in which the internet is empowering small businesses, and not being a medium dominated by large companies. If you are interested in Shopify, there is more to come on this topic from Jet Digital.