Google Sites: Set up a Store & Sell Products for FREE! (In-Depth Tutorial)

okay so lately a ton of people have been loving my google sites tutorial videos and i've been getting a lot of comments wondering if you can set up a store inside of google sites and at first i didn't think this was possible at all because there's no direct option to do this inside google sites but there's actually some really great external ways that you can actually add into google sites to make it a store so this is really cool so in my previous videos this was obviously a bit of an oversight i just thought that i was setting up a website as a portfolio but obviously a lot of people want to sell things on their website so making a store is a really important thing that i needed to cover so that's what i'm going to be covering in today's video and i hope it's helpful just to give you more options i'm going to be going over two different ways to add a store to your google site the first is easiest but they're both free and the second looks a bit more professional so let's jump into the first method so first things first we of course need to go to google sites and if you've seen my previous tutorials the website might look familiar it's the same one so what we need to do now is add a store as you can see there's no page here on the side for store so what i'm going to do is go over to the right here under pages click the little plus at the bottom and just name a new page as store and click done so i'm going to add it in i don't really care what it is i think i'm just going to drop it under youtube here but now we have this page which is a store and i'm just gonna change the font a little bit change the header type just to match my style okay so now this page matches my other pages just in style and what i'm gonna do now is the most basic option to add a store to your site and basically you can just go to insert click on button and what you can do is just name your button whatever it might be i'm just going to do an example for photography stuff so buy my preset something like that something for like photography presets on lightroom now this method isn't going to directly add a store to your google sites like they can't actually purchase the item inside of your website but what it's going to do is allow you to link another site where you can sell your items so they can click on the button it takes you to another store where they can purchase your item so just for this example i'm going to use a website called selfie i don't actually have any products on here but i'm just going to copy this one person's products as you can see it just has this nice site where it says what the product is usually has an image it's not loading right now but then it has the price and you can purchase the item so i'm just going to copy the link right here go back to my website and paste that link and now once i click insert i have this button that says buy my presets and when you publish your website when you click on that button it's going to take them directly to that site where they can actually purchase your item whether it be selfie or some other site where you can sell your products online there's a ton of different ones but that's by far the easiest option and the button looks pretty nice it's simple and it's easy to click now of course with this button on your website you can also add a photo above it if you want to give an example of what your product is you can give a description under it so when they click on it it can have the price in it so they know what they're getting into when it takes them to the external site you can also add an image to your site just with this button over here on the right and when it loads what you can do is basically click on the image click the little link thing here and add another link like i did before so just to this website here click apply and so if they click on the photo that will also take them to the site where they can buy your product super simple as you can see so if i just publish that site real quick and go to my finished site you can see now under my sidebar you can see store if i click on store you can see this button here if you hover over it it kind of adds a little shadow thing and if you click on it it takes you to that website redirects you where you can actually buy this product so again you can have a photo right here if you click on the photo as well it can also redirect you so that's the most basic option as you can see it's super simple super fast to do but it doesn't directly have a website where you can have a cart inside of your google site you have to go somewhere external but next i'll be showing you another way to do this where you have an actual store with a cart inside of your google sites where they can do everything internally so let's jump into that so to do this next part you're going to need to go to a website called ecwid i'm not exactly sure it's pronounced ecw id basically if you just click on your website you can see that they're a company that allows you to start selling on facebook as you can see here or amazon basically anywhere you want to sell but it also works for google sites or any other website like wix and things like that so what you're going to do is go up to the top right here and click get started for free like i said it is a free website but it does have some premium features if you want to pay for it but you can pretty much do all the major features for free which is really cool so once you finish the little setup thing it will take you to your dashboard where you can see an overview of all your things if you have purchases where people have made orders you can see the orders you can also see different reports on analytics and stuff like that which is pretty cool but this website is actually really easy to control over here on the left like google sites you can see you have all your control panels where you can manage sales you can manage sales channels configuration design all those sorts of things so i'm just going to run you through a quick setup for this and how you can integrate it then into google sites so first things first you need to add some products to your store so the first thing i'm going to do is go under catalog right here and then click on products and it's just going to take you to this blank page where you're able to add a new product so i'm just going to click add new product it's going to give you a bunch of different options here to customize that product i'm just going to run you through a quick setup for one so because i do photo video stuff for this example i'm going to be showing you how to upload say a photo print to the site as a product so first under general i'm going to click upload images i'm just going to click one on my desktop here it's lcap at sunset it's a really cool photo so i'm going to click upload there i'm going to name it lcap at sunset i'm just going to enter a random weight here like one pound it's not super specific but it doesn't really matter and then click require shipping or pick up because you kind of need to deliver the product somehow and then you can just add a description here if you want i'm just going to say like super high quality laser print something like that just gives a little overview of your product now i'm going to go over to the right here and under pricing to set a price let's just say like 15 or something you can see that there's these other options that have these stars next to them but they are the premium options so you have to pay for the paid account for ecwid or whatever it is to actually access these options but most of the things like i said are free as you can see here product availability you can either turn it on or off but stock control it does cost money to add a certain amount of stock to make sure you don't sell out of the item but you can change the product availability so now under this product i'm going to go over to options which is a super cool place where you can add different variations to your products so if you're selling shirts you can sell different sizes if you're selling shoes different sizes all sorts of different variations you can add that change the price so i'm going to click add a new option and for this i'm just going to say print size so we can just have a different print size and then for input type i'm going to do sizes and as you can see there's different options here so now i'm going to click add new value i'm just going to say like print sizes 8 by 12. these are super random print sizes not realistic at all to the actual size of the print but just for an example here this is super cool under price modifier i'm just going to leave it at zero dollars this just means it's going to be 15 to purchase this size now i'm going to click add new value i'm just going to say like 18 by 24. let's say that this has a price modifier of 10 so now this cost 25 let's just do 24 by 36 let's say it has a price modifier of 20 so now we have three different size options the two different sizes have additional prices added to them that modify your price so it's a super cool way to add different sizes when you're actually selling a product that might have different sizes now if we go over to tax and shipping you can see that there's an option to enable requiring shipping or pickup which i have right now because you need to ship your product you can also enter the dimensions and weight shipping rates and then set up taxes so super cool i'm not going to go through that right now but there's a lot of different options in here that you can really get into and customize your product now if we go over here to related products this is super cool if you've created other products you can assign products that are related to it so when people click on it they might find other things that they're interested in in your store to encourage people to buy more things or find new things that they might not have seen before so that's a cool feature and then there's another button over here for buy now basically you can embed this one product anywhere on your site instead of having your whole store it's just this one specific item it's like it says promote products on your blog sidebar of your site or any other place literally so super cool feature just to add a little buy now button anywhere on your site so once you've set up your product how you like it you can simply just click save and it will save it to the site and then you can just go in and add as many more products as you want i'm just going to quickly add a few more products to the site just so you can see an example but since you already know the example i'm not going to show you exactly through the process okay so i've added some more products to my store and as you can see here they're right here for products and then if i go under here to categories basically what this is you can create different categories where your products are listed under so for free you can only create two different categories but right here you have the storefront page this is the default one but then you can create two on addition to that so basically here i have photo prints here and you can see i have an image cover image for it and a description basically what you can do is enable it or disable it and then you can add category products so i can assign products to this category so if i click on this i can just click to add all these products because they all apply to this category and now these products are assigned under the category of photo print so we can just save that real quick and then this just makes it easier to add it to your site and kind of organize things so now let's get into how you can actually change the look and appearance of your store so if you go down here under configuration you can see that there's a design option so if you just click on design we'll come up with all these different options for changing the look of your store so first of all image size i'm just going to keep it large just so you can see the products the best that you can you can also change it if you have a lot of products to like small image ratio i'm just going to keep it same at landscape 3.2 product card and details layout i like to have it centered i think it looks the best here product card frame you can choose to have a little frame around your photos here i just like to keep it off i think it looks cleaner product name like to show it product price like to show it don't show sku additional product image show over mouse hover i don't have any additional images but you can kind of see an example if you hover over it here basically you can see additional images if you hover over it and i pretty much like the default settings here and then if you have different categories this is what it would look like so you can see apparel here you can get a little preview of each of these if you have four different categories again you only get two categories for free but if you pay for it you can get more categories for product layout when you actually click on an item this is what it's going to look like you can see you can get a preview here you can click through the images see what it's like to change the options and stuff like that but i like how it looks here i think two columns products description is on the right again obviously all these settings are up to you but i honestly really like how the default setup so i don't really find myself needing to change much here so now once the look of your store is set up now you need to set up payment so under configuration if you just click on payment it's actually super simple they've made it really easy to do so basically what you're going to see here is a lot of different methods you can have to actually set up payment for your store for me the easiest method is just paypal so if i just click enable paypal it basically just creates that as an option for people to pay by i think it's the most secure and also the most simple the most people have it but there's tons of different options as you can see here you can use square you can use manual payment methods like cash on delivery bank transfers things like that and you can also create things like visa mastercard all sorts of different ways to pay so it's amazing how they set this up and it's actually really easy to control whereas on some sites payment is just an entire pane so it's really nice how simple this is once your payment is set up you need to go adjust your shipping settings so under configuration let's click on shipping and pickup you can see right here i've set a few but basically i have free shipping for fedex and the usps but just like payment it's ridiculously easy to set up so if you want to click on shipping just click add shipping you can have all these different options let's say we want to use fedex so let's click set up fedex you can now change the different rates you can have free shipping if you want the customer to pay nothing and you to pay the shipping you can also set up automatic calculated fees conditional free shipping flat rate custom rates all these are super easy so let's just try automatic calculated rates click setup fedex so now you just enter your address in here now this is where the products are going to ship from so it estimates the price from that location and then you can adjust different settings here like whether your shipping region is the world the types of shipping that you want to pay for all these sorts of things which is just super cool that you have so much flexibility really easily inside of ecwid's website so now you're basically ready to go now i'm going to show you how to get this store into your google site super easily again for completely free so the first thing you need to do inside of ecwid's website is go under sales channels and click overview now we're going to have these options to sell everywhere like it says right here so unfortunately google sites is not one of the options of the sites in here but it's super easy to adapt it basically all you need to do is click on custom website because google sites i guess is essentially a custom website and you're just going to click learn more now all you need to do is click this little blue button right here to get the ecwid integration code so just click that it's going to copy this embed code right here and now we just need to go to google sites to paste it in and you'll see how instantly it works so now we're inside of my google sites website under the store page and basically all i'm going to do is go over to the right here under insert click embed i'm going to click embed code and i'm just going to paste that code that i just copied from the other website as you can see it pastes this big code right here but it's not super important just click next and it's going to show you a little bit of an example of your code you're just going to click insert and that code is going to pop up and create an embedded store directly inside of google sites so as you can see the sizing is a bit off right now but basically just adjust the side panels to make it fit how you want it it does take a little bit of adjustment but once you get it in there it fits really nicely and looks really good okay so as you can see the store from ecwid has been put into google sites but you can't really control much about it right now because it's still as an embed code you actually have to publish the website to be able to control and preview how the site actually would work how the store would work but you can get a pretty good example by this on the look of it and it looks really clean but now i'm going to publish my site really quickly give you an example and walk through of actually how to use your store and how professional it looks okay so if we load up my website and we go click on store over on the left here you can see that instantly it loads up the store that looks super professional and like it wasn't built with google sites which is super cool if you hover over the photos you can see it zooms in a little bit which is a really professional touch looks really nice here it kind of highlights the text as well right there you can see the prices the name of the item as you can see right here featured products is our first category up the top and then if you scroll down you can see that other category i made which is photo prints which gives an example here so if you don't want the featured products you can get rid of that and then you can just show the photo prints but if you click on a product let's say el capita sunset as you can see it just loads the full image looks super great you get the title you get the description and then you get the print sizes so as you can see if i click 8 by 12 the price is the same if i click 18 by 24 it raises the price 24 by 36 raises the price again super cool and it has these little flashy things that look really professional on it if you find a size that you want you can say add to bag so now just check marks add the bag you can add more or go to checkout and it's pretty cool if you click go to checkout it brings you to this page it looks like a professional shopping cart you can see what you're ordering you can enter your checkout information and you can just pay for it in any of these methods so unfortunately because i set up this account with my paypal account and i haven't set up the visa or mastercard options yet i can't actually show you an example on how the payment works but i have used a cash method before where you just promise you'll pay later and it works really well it sends it directly to your ecwid account you can see and manage the order you get an email on the order confirmation and it works just like shopping at any other store so it seems really seamless now as cool as this store is there is one problem that isn't really great basically because this is an embedded code inside your website you can't go back in pages it loses all of your history or if you click on another page on the website it loses what's in your cart and your orders because it's not contained really to the site it's a separate site that's controlling things but basically as you can see here i have something in my shopping bag here but if i click back to my home page for example and i go back to the store as you can see it brings you back to the front page of the store and if you go down to the bottom and click shopping bag there's nothing in your shopping bag so this is obviously a bit problematic because if someone's exploring your site add something to cart go check out other things they lose that item so it's not the end of the world if they stay within that page it works really well but if you leave anywhere you just have to be aware of that and also you do have to note let's just say you're in your shopping cart and you want to go back if you click back it's going to take you to back to the home page not back to another page in the store so if you're in the store and you go to your shopping bag and you want to go back basically instead of clicking the back button you have to click this little breadcrumb here so just click store right there and it will take you right back so that works pretty well but it's not ideal like i said but again let's just get some more examples of these products let's click on winter camping under the stars as you can see here get a preview of it get a description here get our size add to bag if we want to go back we can just click back to catalog right here let's just click on into the haze as you can see here it's a photo preview different sizes different price options this one's real expensive here 100 by 300 inch print um add to bag we go to our shopping bag here you can see our different products that we've chosen you can change the quantity amounts of these and then you can just enter information card numbers and like i said here shipping is free so you just check out sends it to your account super easy to manage everything and it's pretty awesome so like i said it's not super ideal but i would have to say for a free option integrated into a free website this store looks pretty professional and it's very usable and you can sell pretty much any products and i think it's a really cool addition but anyway that's it for today i hope this video was helpful and i hope it answered some of your questions about setting up stores in google sites but if you like this video be sure to like and subscribe down below and i will see you all next time [Music] you

Channel: Tava Kessler

Views: 29,524

Rating: 4.9211173 out of 5

Keywords: google sites, google sites tutorial, how to use google sites

Id: m5gYbgTb8AQ

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021