Selling both products and services can be tough
Products and services almost never mix well on basic e-commerce sites. The reason is that the people who design e-commerce solutions for products are thinking about either digital downloads (like a song or eBook) or shippable products (like t-shirts). Both have a fixed price with a finite set of options.
The process for purchasing either is pretty simple. Find a product, configure it, see the modified price, put it in your cart, and pay.
But how do you put a service in that same cart? It's not always easy, is it?
The folks that build solutions for service delivery (membership sites, consulting, etc) are thinking about recurring charges and it's reflected in how they build carts and purchase processes.
But what happens when you want to offer both?
That's what I was facing as I started to sell both eBooks (products) and coaching (services) on chrislema.co. The other day, when someone asked about it, I promised I'd share how I do it, so here it is.
The answer for me has been Cart66 Cloud – an e-commerce solution that gives me the ability to sell both products and services in a really clean way.
Now, to be clear – I'm not saying you can't do it with any other products. I know you probably could. I'm just not sure you could do it any easier or faster than this.
Cart66 Cloud offers me three things I really love:
- Off-site PCI-compliance (so I don't have to think about it)
- Easy configuration of both products and services
- Membership features that can be integrated in
Rather than write a lot, I thought I'd show you how easy it was to create both products and subscriptions via this set of quick videos. Each video is less than five minutes. But they're show you the exact things I've done on my own site to be able to sell both products and services.
1. Creating an eBook Product
2. Creating Products with Variations
3. Creating Subscriptions for Services
4. Creating Memberships
As you can see, using Cart66 Cloud is pretty easy. Of course I'm not only a fan, I'm a client – using it to power this site. So check it out and let me know what you think.