How to Create a Free Online Bookstore

Creating an online bookstore is a considerable option if you’re passionate about books and want to make money out of it.

Lower running costs and not having the hassle of building a brick and mortar store makes an online bookstore a viable choice.

Keep reading to get to know how to create a free online bookstore.

A statistical data shows that online book sales reached upwards of $18 Billion till the year 2020. If we compare, online book sales represent only a little fraction of total retail sales.

The above statistic makes online book sales poised to achieve better fractions.

Another Statistic shows us the distribution between Physical and Online sales of books which portrays a healthy rising trend in the sale of books through online channels.

Now, let’s see below about selecting the right e-commerce platform as per your needs,

Choosing the appropriate e-commerce platform is essential for the prosperity of your online bookstore venture in the digital market.

Efficiently managing your store requires a user friendly interface that allows easy navigation which can be easily achieved via development services.

It is important to take into account the ease of updating products, handling orders, and configuring your website without the need for technical skills.

Considering the potential growth of your business, it is crucial to select a platform that can adapt and expand along with you. It’ll have to handle higher levels of traffic without compromising in performance.

Let’s check below the Bagisto e-commerce platform and how it can help achieve your goals,

Bagisto is a Laravel based e-commerce platform which is free and open source. It is built upon Laravel which is an open source PHP based web framework.

This e-commerce platform can be utilized by businesses of all sizes, from small to large enterprises.

Having a flexible system will allow to create a platform as per your requirement. You can use Bagisto to either create a single seller store or a multi vendor marketplace.

Now, let’s get to know the major differences between a single seller store and a multi vendor marketplace.

A Single vendor e-commerce store comprises of only 2 entities i.e Store Owner and Customer.

On the other hand, a multi seller marketplace comprises majorly of 3 entities i.e Store Administrator, Multiple Sellers and Customers.

Below are some of the key differences between a Single Vendor Store and Multi Vendor Marketplace,

Customer Traffic

A single seller store will have relatively less traffic due to store owners usually offering niche products and customers coming from defined communities.

A Multi Seller Marketplace will have greater customer traffic as multiple sellers will sell multiple range of products on the store, thus, attracting customers from all areas.

Development Cost

The cost for developing a is significantly lower in a single vendor store as it has lesser development complexities.

A Multi Vendor Marketplace may involve multiple custom solutions which can make its development cost higher.

Quality Control

The product quality maintenance is better in single seller e-commerce store than in a marketplace having multiple sellers.

Moving forward, the first step in creating an online bookstore would be choosing the right type of hosting.

You can utilize some free hosting services like AWS Free Tier, GCP Free Tier or Azure Free Tier which offer good hosting configurations.

Next, you’ll have to choose a Domain name suitable for your bookstore. Having a suitable and easy to pronounce domain name can result in better ranking in search results.

Usually, hosting service providers offer domain name registration as well.

Now, it is time to start building your e-commerce shop. You can start by downloading Bagisto. For now, we will build a single seller store.

You can also install it into your local development environment. A full installation guide is also provided to successfully install and configure Bagisto.

The latest version of Bagisto has an in-built GUI(Graphical User Interface) which makes its installation hassle free.

After the successfull installation, you’ll have to configure it, let’s move forward to get to know more about it.

You can also take help from Bagisto Development Services to help you build your online store.

By Accessing the backend, the Store administrator has many functionalities out of the box.

Initially, they have to configure the Store by filling in environment details such as Application Name, Default URL for storefront. Further, the admin will setup the default currency, locale and timezone as well.

A GUI will also be provided to configure additional environment dependencies like Database Hostname, Database Port, Database server username and password.

After the above configurations are done, the admin can now access the backend as well as the Storefront.

Below is an example image of the Bagisto storefront with demo products,

The admin can now proceed with adding products, managing categories, creating attributes and attribute families.

The admin backend of Bagisto offers various functionalities free of cost for the store owner which are listed below,

• • Dashboard: A dedicated dashboard for viewing store statistics and overall details.

• • Sales: From here, the admin can manage Orders, Shipments, Invoices, Refunds & Transactions.

• • Catalog: Section to manage products, categories and attributes.

• • Customers: Segment to manage Customers and Reviews.

• • CMS: A Content Management System is provided.

• • Marketing: The Marketing section is used to manage Promotions, Communications and SEO for the store.

• • Reporting: The admin can view the reports for Sales, Customers and Orders from here.

• • Settings: This section houses various options to manage the store such as Currency, Locale, Exchange Rates, Users, Roles, Themes etc.

• • Configure: This is the configuration section where options are provided to configure settings such as Shipping, Payment methods, Order settings, Email settings etc.

So that’s how you can build your own online single-seller bookstore.

You can also create a multi vendor marketplace to allow for multiple sellers to register on it and sell their products on it.

There are several platforms with multi vendor marketplace extensions. Bagisto also has an extremely user-friendly and full-fledged marketplace extension.

However, building a marketplace may require custom solutions and integrations which may incur several costs.

Let’s check below some examples of how Bagisto provided solutions to create bookstores,

Garuda Books were looking for various e-commerce solutions and found Bagisto to be a perfect fit for their problems.

Using the solutions and add-on provided by Bagisto Extensions, they were able to succeed in their vision of having a platform through which users can easily purchase books.

Darussalam International is another company who chose Bagisto over other open source platforms such as WordPress WooCommerce, Magento 2 and CS-Cart development to build their online store.

To help advertise its products in the market, Darussalam opted to build an online e-commerce store through a platform which is scalable, configurable and adaptable.

Bagisto promptly helped them achieve their goals.

So, that was the process about how to create a free online bookstore be it single seller store or a multi vendor marlketplace to turn your passion into a thriving business.

Bagisto offers a seamless platform along with the Bagisto extensions for presenting your bookstore to a worldwide audience, thanks to its user-friendly interface and powerful features.

With streamlined shopping experiences and effective inventory management, Bagisto provides you with the necessary tools to boost customer engagement and increase sales.

If you require further assistance or more information, please reach out to us through support@webkul.com or raise a ticket at webkul.uvdesk.com