Brochure websites vs. E-commerce websites Squarespace & Wordpress vs. Bridge & Shopify
Carol Schroeder, a store owner who pens a nice blog about retail, reviews website design services in her post this week. Carol mostly covers 'brochure style' website design tools. Brochure sites are characterized by attractive pictures and often a lack of functionality. My hope here is to stress how different brochure websites are from online stores. It's also to share my view that brochure sites are good for regular people (non-commercial enterprises), and they're not ideal for retailers.
To group brochure sites and e-commerce stores together is like grouping a firetruck with a Kia because they both have wheels and engines. In fact, they're very different. Different manufacturers, different uses, sizes, drivers, costs, etc.
Since making money and organizing products are the lifeblood of a store, the first question a gift store wants to ask when building a website is: does the software center around an e-commerce engine? Secondly, a gift store may ask: does the software include a gift registry?
Brochure sites do neither of the above.
Squarespace, Wordpress, and Wix are all informational, news sites, that offer e-commerce platforms as afterthoughts. They are not e-commerce engines first and foremost, and this is fundamentally problematic.
Furthermore, Squaresquare does not offer a gift registry for items. (It does offer a gift card--aka cash--option.) Wordpress offer a gift registry as an add-on.
Of all the sites mentioned by Carol, Shopify makes some sense because it's based around an e-commerce engine. But it is still over complicated and time consuming.
What website design software could be better then Shopify? Bridge. Bridge offers retail stores a quick solution to setup an e-commerce store and includes a free bridal and gift registry system.
Since Bridge is not a brochure website tool, it doesn't have the large pictures and glossy brochure feel. With that said, most consumers simply want to make a quick purchase online, not watch a slideshow of storefront pictures.
In addition, unlike other systems, Bridge Stores can be pre-populated with up to 50,000 products from 100 leading home goods brands.
Due to this, Bridge provides a time savings over Shopify, Squarespace, and Wordpress.
The primary considerations when setting up an online retail store are: + How quickly can you add product? + Is any of the product 'self-updating'? Preferably yes. + How quickly can you add news? + Is any of the news 'self-updating'? Preferably yes. + Does your website connect you to your network of business associates? Preferably yes.
Bridge addresses all the points above.
What is less important: + A 'grand' home pages. Most consumers will start in Google, and enter you website via a subpage, not your home page. + Frilly design. + Custom coding and features. The more unique your site is, the more consumers will not know how to navigate it. Also, the more expensive it will be to update it and work around it.
Note: custom content should not be confused with custom coding / features. Facebook is great at letting you customize content. Yet, it doesn't allow you to add custom features like change the wallpaper color of your Facebook page. Reason: custom content is important. Custom wallpaper and other features less so.