There are simply so many apps and software to use to sell products online that it has become confusing.

There are the leaders in the field which are:

  1. WordPress with WooCommerce
  2. Shopify
  3. Clickfunnels
  4. Samcart

Now, which to use and grow your business? Each has their Pro’s and Con’s which we will discuss on this today and help you decide how to use them.

Which Platform should you use in 2020 that helps Sell and market your products and services?

WordPress is a Content Beast

WordPress was and still is designed mainly for content creation and sharing. It is known as CMS (content management software).

But as it has grown it has gained many premium apps which adds additional functionality. Such as the Woocommerce Plugin that allows WordPress to also become a shopping eCommerce website.

However, for many users, I would advise against this. Simply because there is far better software that specializes in being a shopping cart.

But the main problem here is speed and technical issues. You see, most likely you will be self-hosting WordPress. Which is great for blogging and digital product funnels. See my related post on building your blog website and self-hosting it.

RELATED POST: Blog Startup and Self Hosting

But self-hosting an eCommerce store..I would ask you to really think about it. If you are selling a very few collections of products, have a fast reliable Hosting provider, then go for it as it will be cheaper than paying for a shopping cart solution.

But if you are serious about:

  1. selling products online,
  2. building a brand,
  3. building your 1000 true fans
  4. Focus on selling and not technicals of websites and bug fixes
  5. Want dedicated Support if something stops working

Then go with a dedicated shopping cart like Shopify. Because the last thing you want to do when your primary goal is to sell your excellent products to your customers is to have a website crash, or a checkout functionality is broken. Losing your potential sales and adding a ton of stress to you.

You can go with a Managed Hosting company that specializes on WordPress and Woocoomerce such as:

  1. Dreamhost
  2. Liquidweb
  3. Wpengine
  4. Kinsta

Why Managed hosting? Because is something that happens to the site like bugs, crashed or slow loading, their service guarantee to fix it for you, so you can focus on selling.

Why you should not set up with Managed WooCommerce on WordPress

But really what you should do is go with dedicated eCommerce stores like Shopify. They do not have any storage limitations or bandwidth restrictions. Plus on their starter package, it works out to be cheaper.

You won’t need to fiddle around with technicality, bugs or worry about loading speeds. Softwares like Shopify are built to do 1 thing very well and that is to sell products.

You will have:

  1. Unlimited Customer
  2. Unlimited bandwidth and traffic
  3. Unlimited technical support
  4. Unlimited image and video storage
  5. Unlimited product sales

But all is not great still.

As mentioned in our blog post on why blog and content marketing is key to success, eCommerce carts are not designed to make and promote content as they only are designed mainly to sell products.

WordPress is designed to promote and market content. Now, these two types of software do not easily integrate with one another. Trust me we have tried.

The solution is WordPress and Shopify

WordPress with Shopify

So our solution we married both WordPress and Shopify together.

What we suggest is Setup a WordPress site on a sub-domain, or your main domain depends on what you want to be known for. And add a shopping cart like Shopify on the other.

  1. If your main marketing strategy is through content, then you should set up WordPress as the main domain. Example www.Yourdomain.com.
  2. If your main aim is to be a brand selling products and use WordPress for content, then set up WordPress on a sub-domain. Example: WordPres.Yourdomain.com and point your main domain (yourdomain.com) to your Shopify site.

This setup allows you to own your own content on your own web host. Always keeping the content authority on search engines if you ever choose to change the shopping cart.

You can deliver awsome content on your WordPress blogs, and direct customers to your product pages on the shopping cart of Shopify.

But for Startup brands creating sales purely on content marketing will take time. What if you want to get sales straight away?

No one knows your eCommerce site exists, and search engines like Google will time to drive organic traffic to your blog.

You can social media content to drive traffic, but unless you are paying for ads that too will take time to build traction.

What is a solution to this? I have spent a long time trying to look into this and the answer is not simple, but possible.

What you need is the addition of Landing Pages and Sales Funnels

What are Landing Pages?

Landing Pages are specifically designed for marketing purposes. You can see an example here on Riseicon.

They are specially designed pages, to highlight the product or services’ key selling points. A webpage where you direct all your marketing campaigns like emails, social media ads, search engine ads and affiliates to. This is the page you direct the traffic to.

Websites like a blog site, the goal is to encourage the user to explore your website and learn about you and your content. Landing pages are only designed to do one thing. A specific action you want the audience to do. Such as sign-up to your email, buy a product or service. This is known as a CTA (Call to Action).

Its this simple laser focus of a landing page that increases conversion compared to a standard product page. They have no clutter and no other distractions unlike a normal homepage and product page.

Landing Pages are used mainly for 2 reasons:

  1. Click-through Landing Pages: This is mainly used for product sales or services. It encourages people to click and go straight through to purchase
  2. Lead Generation Landing Pages: Designed mainly for generating leads and followers where you encourage people to offer their emails or to not so often used, to subscribe to your social media (though not really used for this often)

How to create Landing Pages

There are so many apps and methods to create Landing Pages and it’s simply confusing to many with all the sales and hype around them.

That this article is about simplicity and not making it complex for you to start and creating a barrier to entry due to complexity.

More advanced methods I will go into on another post. Please check back later or ↓↓Sign-up↓↓

1.Use WordPress to create your Landing Pages

WordPress is excellent to create content-based pages. It is easy for search engines to find and for you to rank for keywords per page. (This is SEO optimization)

The best way to create landing pages and easiest for the average person and brand owner is to use page builders.

There are 2 main ones really.

  1. DIVI Themes by Elegant themes (which we recommend)
  2. Elementor Themes
Our recommended Page Builder

Using these page builder on your WordPress is cost-effective, and an excellent solution. Avoids additional software learning and you can use it for your entire site also. So its value for money.

They usually come with pre-made templates for landing pages which you can use. Themes like DIVI only costs $89 for the whole year, which is about $7.4 a month. Compared to dedicated Landing page builders like Leadpages which cost between $300 to $2388 a year! So please do not waste money on these hyped products.

Use Divi or similar instead, combine it with an email autoresponder like ConvertKit or GetRespone at which point you will be able to do email marketing and social media retargeting ads.

Getting a dedicated landing page is not needed if your main goal is simply to direct attention to a product or capture a lead for secondary marketing through social media retargeting or email campaigns.

2. Dedicate Landing page and Sales Funnel Software

Where you need a dedicated landing page software is when you are really launching and selling something, like products, courses or services.

They are sales focused and have high converting strategies built-in.

There are a few software are known as Sales Funnel software that has a built-in landing page builder to achieve conversion. Most famous and popular being Clickfunnels. Others popular ones are SamCart, CartFlow and recently, GetResponse.

These are software that is dedicated to converting incoming traffic. They have built-in Opt-in’s, Video Hosting, Upsells and Downsells, customer segmentation for future marketing, integrations with various add-on software.

You divert organic and paid traffic to these pages to achieve a measurable set goal. They do nothing else but that. Except that of CartFlow which is a WordPress plugin, the rest are all service hosted on the companies website so you do not need to worry about the technical side of things, only to convert and make sales.

Conclusion

To summerise, how and when to use each piece of software depends on what your objectives are, and where you are in your brand/business growth.

For early start-ups, you can combine WordPress, Divi Landing Pages, and Shopify to create a simple. Landing Page > To Sales. Making the most of the power of WordPress and headache-free setup of Shopify

For more Intermedia businesses you have 2 options:

  1. Combine WordPress Landing pages with Shopify and do Shopify Sales funnels through paid Shopify apps for Order Bump and Downsells.
  2. For slightly more money, you can have a Shopify Landing Page builder dedicated App combined with an Email Autoresponder like ConvertKit.

For Advanced Users and businesses with fast ambitions and slightly more marketing budget. You are best suited to go with ClickFunnels or SamCart for product launches and dedicated campaigns. Still have Shopify if you have a collection of products as a brand, but use Sales Funnel software on top to do targeted campaigns for your select product.

I hope this article has helped you to be that little more clear about which software to use and when. There are simply so much hype and marketing that you can get confused easily as they all seem to promise the world. If you respect each tool for what it was ORIGINALLY designed to do and use it in your marketing toolbox then you will get the best results without wasting money.

I will write further articles on how to use each software and combine them to create great tech stacks to generate leads and sales. Please Sign up to the newsletter so you can be updated when these articles come out. Or follow us on our social media where will post updates.

Have fun guys, do not stress, keep husting the Risingway.