Happy Friday everyone!
Who wants a simple online shop to start taking direct orders via PayPal, bypassing those margin killing eBay fees, WITHOUT spending a dime on a shopping cart? And no, I’m not talking about using free, open source carts like Open Cart, which are far more complex to learn and set-up. I will show you a much simpler approach to get a basic website up and running using templates from Spicy Auction Templates!
Here’s a recent email I received from my blog reader:
Hi Andrew,
I’m a BIG fan of your blog, love what you do and wanted to say thank you for the information you provide here. I have already started working on my eBay business plan and plan on purchasing your EAB course very soon.
As I understand, with the purchase I get free SAT membership too, right?
I saw on one forum that people are using SAT templates to build online shops, is that possible? To take orders directly from people without using eBay?
That would be awesome as I’m not yet in a position to afford a custom designed shop with a fully functioning shopping cart and was looking for a good free/cheap alternative.
Keep up the good work Andrew!
Thanks,
Daniel W.
Thanks for your email & question Daniel.
Yes, you get full access to SAT, absolutely free, when you purchase Easy Auction Business.
And yes, it is possible to create a simple online shop (basically more like a simple website) using Spicy Auction Templates and I will quickly cover how it can be done now.
The first step is to create a page in Turbo Lister, exactly as if you were creating a listing for eBay:
1. Add your SAT template.
2. Create your custom listing by adding product pictures, the description, additional information and then formatting it all.
3. Add a PayPal Buy Now button for taking payments.
Now this is one additional step that you don’t have to worry about when creating a listing for eBay. A PayPal button is basically a simple way to take payments online – as PayPal themselves put it “Payment buttons let you securely accept credit card, debit card, or PayPal payments on your website from any mobile device, tablet, or PC.”
Creating a PayPal button is incredibly easy, you “simply log in to the PayPal website to create, and optionally customise, a payment button. Then copy and paste the payment button’s HTML code snippet to your website” (or in our case to Turbo Lister).
4. Copy the final HTML code, paste it in to a Notepad file and save that file exactly like this:
index.html
(I’d also suggest saving the Turbo Lister file as well, in case we need to make changes in the future).
And there you go – you now have the homepage of your online shop created!
The next step is to get that page online, for which you’ll need a hosting account and a domain name (if you don’t have them already).
A domain name is the address for your site online – i.e. eBay.co.uk or AndrewMinalto.com and the hosting account is basically where you “store” your website so that other people can access it.
For your domain I’d suggest using GoDaddy – the world’s largest domain registrar. They often have amazing deals on .co.uk domain names, which can be as low as £2 for 2 years!
After you’ve purchased your domain name (the process is incredibly simple and if you do need any help, GoDaddy offer 24/7 support) it’s time to get your hosting set up.
For this I’d recommend HostGator, simply because it’s cheap plus quick and easy to use – perfect for those new to building websites. They offer 3 plans – Hatchling, Baby, and Business and to be honest Hatchling is all you need… so sign up for that, which will cost between $3.30-$10.95 a month.
Once again the process for signing up is incredibly easy and HostGator are there to walk you through it if you need any further help.
The only thing you need to remember is that after signing up for your hosting account, you need to go back to GoDaddy and change the nameservers of your domain name so that they point to your hosting.
Don’t worry – while this may sound slightly confusing, it’s literally a 2 minute job that basically requires typing in some numbers.
Alright, once you’ve got your accounts set up and your nameservers changed, it’s time to get your site online!
1) Login to your hosting account
2) Go to cPanel > File Manager
3) Upload the index.html file to the public_html folder
4) Go to your domain name/website address and your new page should show up!
5) Start taking orders and let all that extra profit build up in your PayPal account!
Yep, it really is as easy as that to get a basic site online using Spicy Auction Templates!
If you ever need to make changes to your page, such as changing the price, editing the product description or product pictures, etc. then you simply edit the page in Turbo Lister and re-upload it to your hosting account so that it overrides the current page. That’s it!
And you can also create additional pages for your site in exactly the same way as we went through earlier, the only difference being what name you use when saving the file. For example, if you create an About Us page then you would save it as about_us.html, if you create a FAQ page then you would save it as faq.html, and so on. The file name should always be in lowercase and have no spaces.
After that you simply upload it to the same public_html folder in your hosting account and you’ll have a website with multiple pages – without having spent a single penny getting it designed (of course you have your hosting and domain name fees, but most eBay sellers need them anyway).
Now I do want to point out that this is of course not a fully functional online shop, but it’s a quick and simple, temporary solution.
If you are interested in creating a fully-fledged eCommerce store, then check out my Ecommerce Magnates course – a complete video course in which I create a REAL eCommerce store in front of your very eyes so that you see exactly what it takes to build a successful business this way.
Have a great weekend!
Andrew
