online store advice

[Maybe this is better in the e-commerce forum? Posted there, apologize for the duplication]

Hi folks, I hope things are well.

I am creating a new online store. I don't have a website yet. I don't need my own domain at first. I am located in Canada and would like to sell to Canada OR to (Canada and the US). I will be selling hockey / baseball cards etc. Some but not all items will have images. I need to be able to bulk uploads / updates of items (from csv, excel etc) and have them automatically go into specified categories (tens of thousands of items eventually). Would be nice to be able to sell directly (with Paypal payments) and to facebook. I would like suggestions for a platform which provides all of this, allows me to build a simple website, and would be free for 2-3 months to see how it works out. If it works I would not mind paying a reasonable % of sales.

I have reviewed a lot of the big ones - Shopify (too expensive at least initially), etc... , any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Best,
RH

 

Free, free? no. Cheap, yes.

A plain Wordpress site with the Woocommerce plugin will do most of those things. Some of the more advanced things (bulk upload and automatic population will not be free, but will require plugins that cost maybe $50 or more a year). You will need to get hosting and a domain, though, which isn't free. Maybe $15 for the domain and $5/month for cheap hosting.

 

Shopify easy to start and you just try Google Shopping and FB that's enough for start

 

Hi! It depends..

I love Magento for such benefits:

It's SEOfriendly. SEO advanced support enables products rank on all popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and more. Magento creates title tags automatically as well as lets you to create them manually. It also prevefints you from content duplication, by adding canonical tag, which links your duplicate content. To prioritize categories, products and pages, you can use a sitemap.

Gives Hosting freedom. Unlike Shopify which has several restrictions regarding hosting solutions, with Magento you can use any type of hosting options for online stores.

You can choose between: hosting provider, the model, the package, anything that fits your business needs. Moreover, if someday you decide to migrate to another hosting provider, you can easily move to a cozy corner you like. This option is not available for all eCommerce platforms on the market.

Enables Third-party integration. Magento provides many third-party extensions for various needs such as payment gateway, comments plugin, analytics tool etc. This flexibility lets you easily upgrade services through the extensions.

Scalability, flexibility, speed. No one could deny, that speed is one of the main ranking factors as well as factor, that defines the quality of eCommerce platform. Due to immense Fastly updates for Magento Commerce Cloud, page latency decreased impressively.

The same with scalability and flexibility. Magento cares about anysize stores from small to huge ones. If your store grows, Magento will take care of it as well.

 

as suggested in this thread already and many other places here on the forum, WordPress and WooCommerce is the solution for you, it is free, good support by a helpful community.