One of today’s successful business strategies is to effectively sell your products or services via the internet. But have you ever tried to set up an online shop from scratch? You either have to spend hours creating a website yourself, which is tedious and requires being tech witty, or you have to outsource designing and developing your online store to a third party, which could easily end up being a financial black hole.
Thankfully, there are several solutions with which you can complement or completely substitute an online shop, still being able to successfully sell your products and manage everything that comes with it.
Method No. 1: Selling via Marketplaces
Nowadays selling your products via sites like the ecommerce giants Amazon and eBay is pretty easy. You just create an account, put up your merchandise according to the instructions, and if you let Amazon/eBay do the fulfillment and shipping, all you have to do is sit back and take care of managing your inventory. One of the main hurdles is that Amazon, eBay and other similar sites don’t integrate seamlessly into your accounting solution.
Solutions like A2X and OneSaas automatically fetch your Amazon or eBay data, and send it to Xero or even QuickBooks Online. These third-party apps record each item you put up on your ecommerce account in the accounting software’s inventory. Moreover, the method works vice versa: if you update a product’s stock level, it is going to be updated in the ecommerce site too. A2X and OneSaas are also capable of copying incomes and expenses, and convert them into draft invoices, which are then sent to your accounting software. And, of course, since the above-mentioned sites and accounting solutions fully support integration with payment processors like PayPal, Stripe, Square etc., once a payment is made, you will immediately see it in both accounts.
Method No. 2: Using an Online Form
If you don’t fancy listing your products on marketplaces, you can also collect online sales using a simple form on a webpage. With such forms you can not only capture the contact info of potential customers (if they want to know more about what you are selling), but you can let them order your products as well. Focusing on the latter option, with solutions like 123FormBuilder (which can be integrated into FreshBooks for invoicing purposes), you can easily create one or several forms with complete descriptions, product catalogues, social media recommendation buttons and even the option to let your clients complete their payment.
Method No. 3: Setting up an Online Store
Before you start scratching your head thinking what is this all about, let us assure you that the online shops we are talking of here are not the ones that require you to be a software developer. Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento: these are all ecommerce solutions that let you build and customize an online store using a drag-and-drop website editor without any coding or custom designing and development.
Automating Magento with Xero
Another advantage of these types of online store builders is that they seamlessly integrate into your accounting software, saving you the money you would spend on an integration solution. Furthermore, you can not only customize your virtual shop to your liking, but using such a solution guarantees that you and your clients can do business in a completely safe online environment as well.
Best Online Accounting Software of 2024
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