Bloggingtricks

There are lots of ways to monitize your blog. One way is to add a shopping cart so that you can create an online store. Whether its gas caps or cheese you want to sell, there's probably an online market for it.

But building an e-commerce solution can be a daunting task. It requires programming skills that can humble even the geekiest among us. That's where Shopify comes in.

I just signed up for an account with Shopify and it was about as easy as it could be. I can now add a simple e-commerce solution to any blog and I don't have to resory to something like an Ebay store.

The hosted solution lets you customize the look of your store. Shopify also provides RSS-enabled order tracking, allows PayPal and credit card transactions, allows product grouping, tagging and a host of other features that will make it a joy for most people to build an online store. Shopify takes 3% for this service and that seems more than fair to me.

What's the catch? None so far that I can see. With any new service you have to be careful. I probably wouldn't use them for large transactions given the fact that they still have to prove themselves financially stable enough to weather the storm of competition that will no doubt come their way. But for simple web-based transactions, they offer the most attractive solution I have seen to date.