Selling on Your Website: What you need to know when creating a website store

While we aren't experts on the topic, today we’re sharing our experiences with setting up a website store to sell products from our own websites. And, we’re continuing the conversation in our Mastermind group. Head over there to share any tips or ask any of your hiring questions: www.growwithusmastermind.com. Some links are affiliate links. We pay for the podcast costs using revenue generated when people checkout using our links.

This is a bit of a taboo topic that we are going to jump into today—selling on your website. Angie and I are in no way claiming to be experts on this topic, but we've received a lot of questions about it lately. Our stores are pretty new and we are still in the beginning phases, but we wanted to share our experiences, what we've experimented with and do our best to answer your questions.

Please know that we are in no way encouraging everyone to start a store or to take resources off of TpT. It's a great platform that drives a lot of traffic to our resources and has been a huge blessing for us both. We are simply exploring options to grow our business which has led us to open website stores in addition to our TpT stores.

This is not something for everyone. We are going to answer your questions as honestly as we can to give you a good indication of if this is a good option for you or not. So, here we go:
When or why should you start a website store?
As mentioned above, it's not for everyone. If you're already overwhelmed with creating resources, building an email list, and growing your social media following, it might not be the right time for you. It's not as simple as just throwing up your resources on one more site and calling it a day.
We don't recommend for beginners
This is not something for beginners. If you only have a few resources up at TpT, focus on growing your store there first. They drive traffic to the website and teachers naturally come to it to look for resources. This is the best place to start growing your sales. If you're just starting out, stick with product creation for now.

When you have your own store, you're the only person driving traffic to it. It's not going to just start flowing in without you working on it.
We don't recommend if you aren't looking for additional features
If you don't want to use more features than what TpT already has—if you don't want to pixel customers to retarget them with ads, give coupons to your email list, and things like that—just stick with TpT.

Having your own store allows you to have a lot more analytics about your customers which allows you to target them further. If that's not important to you right now, it's probably not worth your time to start a store on your website.
We don't recommend if you don't have the money and time
It cost money to set up your shop, get traffic to your store, etc. I know a lot of sellers were interested in starting their own stores when TpT increased their commission from 15% to 20%. However, when they made that jump they realized they weren't selling as much on their own stores. TpT gets a lot of organic traffic that you just aren't going to get on your own store. You have to create all of that momentum yourself.

You are going back to square one when you start your own store.

If you're on the fence and can't think of any other reason to start a store than wanting to make more commission, it might not be for you.
What sales platforms should you use?
As we mentioned, Angie and I aren't experts on website stores, so we are only able to share our own experiences here.
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