Shopify?

sirrah

I want to sell car parts online, I know they're everywhere nowadays but it's something I want to do. I have spent the past 9 months with everythingmotoring.com at a cost of £500 +VAT for 12 months. Few teething problems with listings but most are ironed out by now, only thing I can't figure out is the ads don't tell me the amount of views my ads get. I feel like I'm getting very very little return for my fee. Any recommendations, shopify comes to mind, maybe fleabay?

Trojan

Can you give some more details on what you're looking for, and the problem with your existing provider?

Is everythingmotoring a car-specific Shopify equivalent? Or is it somewhere you buy advertising that you send to your own site?

Shopify is quite low cost at entry level, but given your niche you probably need to put up a high number of parts. Are you selling new or secondhand items? If the latter ebay may be more suitable.

sirrah

Here's the web address: http://www.everythingmotoring.com/. It is car specific and the customer pays through paypal after emailing to & fro to discuss about the required parts, price & delivery. I have a very small budget & a lot of parts to sell both new & second hand. I feel the internet is the best place to showcase my stock as opening a real outlet would be too costly. I'm a bit bewildered as to what to do, I thought the website that I have paid to would be a good outlet but considering I have only got €30 back on my £500 investment I'm really disheartened, I know there's a lot of stuff out there for people to choose.

Trojan

Ok, since there's a large stock if it were me I think I'd be looking at ebay to get started. I'd set up a store, get a whole bunch of stock up there with good descriptions and photos. I'd price a bunch of small items at the lowest price affordable to drive some early sales and get good reviews in. There's a lot of info available on how to do this. If I got a bunch of sales then on ebay then I'd look to set up a standalone site with a good brand and drive traffic to it.

Bathroomly

What platform is the existing site on?

Could you not install an e-commerce plugin to the platform you are currently using?

If you are able to invest a bit more into creating e-commerce functionality, there are a few platforms that have extensions which export the products on your site into e-bay. That way, you have two opportunities to sell - it's also fairly easy to manage that way.

When registering as a new seller on e-bay you are often restricted to selling 10 products or up to the value of €x amount - these limits later get lifted, which helps. But in the beginning it may take a bit of time setting up.

Are there no online marketplaces for this industry, which you can sell on (apart from ebay)?

Try and find as many sales channels as you can - but be clever, and see if there are any integrations that you can use to simplify the management of stock and products from one place - ie your website, which then feeds to the rest.