By Eva Williams 11 days ago, Apps and Software
When looking for the optimal tools to help start an online gear store, you have to find suitable builders, applications, and platforms. You’ll need all of them to create and launch your own online store, manage products, and automate hundreds of smaller tasks tied to eCommerce, customer support, content creation, marketing campaigns, and other managerial aspects.
Amazon is known for selling all possible product types and you can use it to sell your gear as well. If you want to start a photography business related to selling cameras, you’ll have to create an Amazon seller account.
Additionally, you need to look at the current sale percentage for listed products. Ordinarily, the referral fees lie in the 8%-15% range.
You can add a camera listing using one of 4 convenient methods: scan your product to create a listing, match a product with an existing listing, take advantage of the “Prepare your listing” tool, or choose “Custom inventory template” to post multiple cameras simultaneously.
Amazon also requires you to complete an auto-approval form to be able to sell photography gear on its platform.
To start an online gear store on this platform, you can either create a business account or upgrade your private profile to a business one. Once you apply to sell on eBay, you’ll be able to create your own eBay shop by taking advantage of one of the premade templates or designing a personalized layout.
If you’re selling items using a personal account, you don’t have to pay anything. That said, if you’re a business owner or simply want to make regular sales, you’ll have to purchase a monthly subscription to one of eBay’s premium plans, the cheapest of which costs $20 a month.
Each time you sell a product, the platform will take a commission. The commission percentage for most product categories is 13% or lower, plus $0.30 per order.
Shopify is a comprehensive ecommerce platform that offers everything you need to launch an online store. Its functionality includes a cutting-edge eCommerce toolset for selling photography gear, a site builder with free and premium templates, integrated marketing tools for creating, running, and evaluating online marketing campaigns, a shopping cart with 100 payment options, and multichannel sales support.
Even a complete beginner can start a photography business with Shopify, and this builder even has a free trial. The prices for the paid subscription start at $32 a month.
Gator Builder is an advanced solution that comes with an array of stunning templates, impressive uptime rates, and the ability to host photography gear stores. This platform lets you choose from more than 200 visually appealing themes, some of which have complete background images. You can find a template for any field you need from finance to photography and weddings.
To ensure the user experience is as streamlined as possible, Gator Builder provides an Express wizard, which you can use to set up an online gear store in just a few clicks. It represents a more automated website builder for photographers created to speed up the website design process and make your shop more mobile-friendly.
The prices for running your own store are very attractive and start from $13.95 a month.
If you’re interested in learning how to start an online gear store tied to selling photography or videography items, Squarespace is among the first eCommerce platforms you should look into. To provide maximum flexibility and customization freedom, eCommerce website builder comes with an expansive range of integrations related to blogs, web design, domains and emails, marketing, digital sales, coding blocks, and other fields.
In addition to launching an eCommerce store, you can take advantage of Squarespace to make a portfolio or blog to showcase and monetize different types of content. You can test this tool for free or purchase a subscription for $23 a month.
WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin created for WordPress, which sets it apart from the other tools featured in this article. You can start photography business with WooCommerce and transform a regular WordPress site into a full-fledged online gear store.
Even though WooCommerce is free and can be installed with zero hassle, you’ll also need an active WordPress account, domain, and hosting. Once you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll be able to choose from more than 300 extensions for further personalizing your eCommerce shop. If you want a more powerful builder without spending a fortune, take a look at Portfoliobox. It offers exclusive tools for website building at a very moderate price.
Adobe Express will help you create flyers, video shorts, Reels, social media graphics, and images for your photography equipment shop.
It provides a convenient set of tools to help start an online gear store, as you can use this solution to edit images and PDFs while also leveraging AI-based features to make simple single-click adjustments like background removal.
Adobe Express lets you mix and match videos, images, and audio files to produce engaging social media content. You can also collaborate with other members of your business to streamline the overall workflow. This tool can be used for free.
Regardless of whether you need to create a brand identity or supportive visual assets for your eCommerce gear store, Canva’s drag-and-drop functionality ensures you’ll achieve the desired results with minimum effort.
This solution allows you to design social media graphics, basic clips, presentations slides, banners, and other types of content while taking advantage of a large library of customizable templates and royalty-free assets that are incredibly easy to use.
The provided “Magic Resize tool” simplifies the task of designing multiple visual assets for your eCommerce shop simultaneously. Meanwhile, Canva’s smartphone application is perfectly optimized and is great for designing visuals on the fly. This tool offers both a completely free plan and paid packages.
Wistia is a great solution for posting and managing videos. Afterward, you can add published videos to your digital gear store to make your products more appealing and marketable.
One of the biggest advantages of choosing this video organizing software is that it lets you freely manage your videos while ensuring they remain online permanently, which isn’t always the case with YouTube. This solution also offers analytics and enables you to create subtitles and transcriptions for your clips. This tool has a free plan.
Seller Assistant is an indispensable companion in attempting to open a gear store online. It brings great help and makes the monotonous process of searching and sourcing products finally less daunting.
One of the outstanding features of the seller's assistant product is its robust page view. In the first moments, all the necessary information—FBA Calculator, product variations, the list of offers—has even been accessed without bothering to go back, and all at handily found Amazon product pages. I could say that this really streamlined process has saved me months of manual research and allowed me to have the utmost confidence in making informed sourcing decisions.
Very cost-effective in terms of tool monthly pricing, starting from just $15.99, saves from extra hassle in operations and quick opportunity seizing.
From ASIN and category information to estimated product sales, and profitability calculations—all have just made it to my easy access. This has immensely helped speed up my product sourcing process and has resulted in achieving lucrative opportunities on the go. You can also use the service together with Outvio for a convenient post-purchase experience, including shipping, product tracking, notification, exchange, and more.
Hootsuite is a useful solution for anyone interested in starting an online gear store, as it lets you manage all popular social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.
This social media customer service software represents the perfect marketing solution for any business that’s trying to establish a trust-based relationship with its customer base on social media.
It can be used for handling and tracking all replies, timelines, shares, and post schedules. You can get Hootsuite by purchasing a subscription for €39 a month.
HubSpot is a specialized solution for inbound marketing, sales, and client support. In terms of marketing, this tool allows you to automate and customize engagement in different channels, create effective campaigns, and increase marketing conversions, while also leveraging personalized reports and useful management features.
This contact management software lets you pick from 3 subscription options, the cheapest of which costs €41/month.
An email marketing software like Mailchimp simplifies your overall marketing workflow by allowing you to create, share, and monitor email marketing campaigns.
Additionally, this solution can be integrated with Shopify, enabling you to synchronize your Shopify information (related to clients, inventory, and sales data) with MailChimp. This tool has a free plan that includes 1000 monthly sent emails.
Coda is a cutting-edge productivity solution that allows users to manage an array of tasks related to their photography gear store like marketing calendars and document organization. This tool is deeply customizable and is perfect for internal project management.
Moreover, this document management software comes with a Shopify add-on that can be integrated into your Shopify store.
This online collaboration software is entirely employee-focused. It allows you and your team to conveniently communicate with each other in real-time.
You can also use Slack to boost the productivity of remote employees while ensuring your store's staff stays organized and completes all their tasks on time.
When opening an online gear store, it’s important to have an eCommerce tool like Google Analytics to collect valuable insights about your site’s visitors, their engagement level, the number of return users, and other relevant real-time statistics. As a result, you’ll know how many users visit your store, where are they coming from, and what they choose to do on your webpages.
Additionally, this web analysis tool comes with advanced functionality that allows you to perform user segmentation, track visitor activity, gauge sales performance, monitor transactions and revenue, and much more.
GTmetrix is a great solution designed for measuring the speed and performance of a web page. It generates useful reports that provide suggestions on how you can improve the efficiency of your online gear store.
GTmetrix offers different plans for you to choose from based on the size of your enterprise and your needs. The cheapest plan will send you back $13 a month.
Acquire is among the most useful tools to help start an online gear store if you’re interested in delivering reliable client support and streamlining your workflow. This solution allows your support team employees to view queries from all digital channels in a single dashboard, making it a lot easier and more time-efficient to address them.
The prices for this customer service software start at $500 a month. Such a cost is staggeringly high, considering that some important tools are simply missing. For instance, if you need cutting-edge instruments for generating and sending receipts and invoices, you may have to look for them elsewhere. For instance, you can purchase them and many other handy extras from SureCart.
Zendesk is a widely used help desk software and eCommerce solution that enables you to view all incoming support queries from various channels (social networks, website, email, chatbots) from a single location.
Additionally, this tool enables you to build a live chat feature into your Shopify online store, conveniently view the necessary client data, and process support tickets with increased efficiency. The cost of this service starts at $19 per employee a month.
