There are many ways you can sell your stuff online. Take pictures and post them to Craigslist, eBay, or my favorite, Facebook Marketplace. Easy peasy. Practically instant.
OR you could do it my way, which apparently takes 5-6 months.
But I’m not sorry! I ended up making a website of my own, which turned out to be so easy, and now you can find everything I am selling at SaraSellsEverything.com. Here’s how I made my own website:
How To Set Up Your Own Online Store
The prep:
Go through your house and decide what to sell. Go room by room, recording everything.
Take several pictures of each item to sell, in good light. A good picture is the one thing will make the biggest impact on sales. Use a real camera if possible, though if you have a good camera on your phone, that’s fine. Use the best of what you have.
I realized late in this process that it would have been helpful for me to stick to one orientation per item–landscape or portrait–while taking pictures, plus one “cover” shot that will look good automatically cropped to a square format. I’m not sure if this has to do with the template I chose or Wix.com in general. But in doing so, you can save yourself from reshoots later.
Record each item, the price you want to sell it for, the dimensions, and a description (as much or as little as you want) in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets. If you have a lot to sell, use tabs on the spreadsheet to categorize your items, such as Bath, Kitchen, Christmas, etc.
Signing up for a free website:
I used Wix.com to create my website, and I could not be happier with the results. It was extremely easy to use and everything (almost) worked completely smoothly. Therefore, I recommend you go to Wix and look through their store templates to see if there is one you like. If there is, sign up with Wix (which you can do through Facebook) and click to edit your site. Fool around with it to see how it works and if it will work for you and your needs.
Wix is free to use while you accept their complicated web address for your site. If you want to connect your own domain name, it’s around $5-7 a month. If you want to connect a payment method so folks can check out on your site, that’s more like $16-17 per month. You can purchase a domain from Wix, or you can connect a domain you already own. I got mine months ago from namecheap.com for about $10 a year. For now, don’t upgrade to a paid plan on Wix, but perhaps look into buying your own domain name if that’s something you think you might want to do.
Adding content to your site:
Download all the pictures you took to your computer. I recommend editing them lightly in an easy program like Picasa, then resize them using bulkresizephotos.com. Set the longest side to 800 pixels and drag all the photos you want into the area designated. This program will resize large amounts of photos very quickly and spit out a zip file at the other end. Save this file to your computer, and extract all the resized pictures.
On your Wix site, upload all the resized pictures to “my uploads” on the left-hand side. If you have a lot of items and they are organized into categories on your spreadsheet, it may be helpful to separate your photos into corresponding folders, both on your computer and in your uploads. That way you don’t have to swim through all your pictures just to find the three you’re looking for. I also made a collection for each category and added each product to the appropriate collection (or multiple collections, if it fits) as I went.
Now it’s time to load all of your products into your store. Click “my store” on the left, or “manage products” on any product page. The template will have a few items in there you can delete, then start adding your own. Click “add products” and fill in the information. This part should be easy because you’ve already decided what you are going to say about each item and how much it sells for. Just copy & paste the information from your spreadsheet into the appropriate fields, choose what photos you want to use and click save. Keep doing that until you are done!
I found that during this part, you see all of your photos in a square format. It was at this point that I thought I might have to retake most of my pictures, but that turned out not to be the case. More on that later.
Designing the website:
Now that you have the products entered, edit your webpage to display all your items. Ignoring the homepage for now, delete all of the store pages in the template except for the first one. Remember to save, but not publish, your changes often. Change the heading on the store page, if necessary, and click on the products below in order to see the “settings” button come up. Click that, and change what collection will display on that page, and any other settings you see that you would like to change. For instance, I kept a sorting option, but not a filter option because it took up too much room. I also changed the grid gallery to display four across instead of three and to center the price under the item name. Just go down the list and see what your options are and play until you get what you like.
If you don’t have multiple categories, then this is all you need to do for your store page. You may even be able to make this page your homepage and be done with it. If you have several collections to display, duplicate that first store page (using the pages menu at the top left) change the header to your next category and change which collection it displays. Save and duplicate that page, change the header and the collection, and keep going in this manner until all of your collections have a page. I ended up with 12 store pages, which Wix automatically included in a menu at the top of the page, and included a “more” option since they wouldn’t all fit.
Now address your homepage. The template I chose had a prettily-designed homepage with tiles that displayed products category names, and the name of my store. Unfortunately, with as many products as I had, these widget tiles didn’t seem to want to work for me. I tried it three times and each time it froze my computer solid. I decided instead that since I wasn’t going to connect a payment method to the site itself, I needed to use the homepage to tell people how to buy from me and what to expect. I did add a slider gallery to the bottom to showcase a few choice products from my collection.
All that to say, do what you want to your homepage. Keep it stylish to reflect your aesthetic, or explain the rules of the house. It’s the front door to the rest of your store, decorate it as you wish. Once you are happy, click that publish button.
Proofing and reshoots:
It’s a good idea to take one good pass through all your products to test how everything looks on the live site, how the photos appear and make any final edits to your descriptions. You can do this by clicking the first item and just hitting next all the way through, with a second tab open to edit the site as you go.
It was at this point that I realized that while I was adding photos to products, they all appeared square, and they all appear square on the store pages, but when you click on a product, you see the full pictures. However, all the pictures will adopt the orientation of the first picture, if that makes sense. If the main photo of your item is vertical/portrait, then the rest of the pictures for that item will be too, whether you shot them that way or not. This led me to an afternoon of retaking some pictures so that they wouldn’t be cut off. For this reason, I recommend sticking to one orientation per item.
Upgrading your website:
Up to this point, your website has been completely free. You can keep it this way, but if you want a web address that is easy to remember, you should connect your own domain name. I had already bought one on namecheap.com, and knew that there was a way to connect it, but couldn’t quite figure out how at first. This was the only real snag I hit in working with Wix, but after a phone call to a super helpful customer service agent, I was on my way.
My problem was that I knew there was a $5/month plan just to connect my own domain, but anytime I clicked an “upgrade” button, I was directed to more expensive plans that would connect a payment method to my store. The trick is to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to a little sentence that said “not a store? Click here.” When I did so, the cheaper plans finally appeared. So now my website address is SaraSellsEverything.com and not https://pantsonfire77.wixsite.com/sarasellseverything.
Sharing and selling:
The benefit of creating a website is that you are able to share your store in stages, if you wish. For instance, I let my mom check out everything I had for sale first, then the rest of my immediate family. Then I sent it out to my friends, then everyone on Facebook. I’ll also post specific items on Facebook Marketplace, sharing my website with those who respond. I’ll reach out to those who have bought from me before, and I even made business cards! That way I can hand them to anyone I meet in person during the day, like my coworkers, or the waitress at dinner, or even going through the drive-through. I just say, “I’m selling everything I own, check it out!” and hand them the card!
I’ve also found that it is easier to talk to someone about the items they want to buy while using the website editor instead of the website itself. Under “Manage Products” you can search products by name and hide or delete each item bought out of the store. I’ve also hidden certain items I want to keep back until I’m ready to sell them, like my mattress and my wireless router.
I am so excited about my website and have found it so easy to set up and use! If you ever want to sell your stuff on a large scale, this is definitely a great option.
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