Create your Ecommerce website with Dazzly

There is endless variation to the number of stories or situations that lead to people opening their own online stores. It may be that you purchased a product from a local market and have found a passion and enthusiasm from your use of this product(s). It may be that you’ve produced an excellent, niche product that is well known amongst your local community but may not be well known beyond that. Whatever it is, existing product or fresh new idea, our team welcomes you to Dazzly and wants to convey to you that you do have the ability to create a website yourself right now and begin accepting payments for your hard work and efforts.

We hope your Dazzly website forms the centre of your online presence and that you get a ton of feedback which you can use to develop your business further. Our team is based in Auckland, New Zealand but our doors and phone lines are always open to listen to your stories, dreams - big or small and help you take the first steps to achieving them. In short, first, you can open the doors to your very own online shop today and second, the team at Dazzly are here to help you any time!

OK lets get into it...

Firstly, browse to the Ecommerce Store template and fill out the sign-up form

You will then appear on the Website screen which will display the information needed for you to publish a great, unique looking website.

1. Logo

   Simply upload an image from your computer, don’t fret if you don’t have one – this isn’t 100% necessary from the get-go – you can add one later

2. Website Colours

   Choosing colours here populates the entire colour scheme for the website, including header, footer, divider and font colours – in one easy setting!

   • If you have uploaded a logo, you will notice Dazzly automatically populates your colour selection (and suggested variations) based on the colours in the logo
   • Alternatively, you can simply select from our colour picker and we’ll suggest our “easy on the eyes” variations that are related to your choice

3. Introduction Text

   Type a small amount of text introducing your business. You don’t need to get this text perfect the first time, just some relevant text that would be appropriate to your business, this adds needed context for when we preview the design.

4. About Image

   Simply upload an image for your computer that is related to your business, it can be an image of yourself, your team, your home, products, premises where you do business, or anything else under the sun that you think is relevant. This image will sit to the right of the About Us Text that we’ll enter next.

5. About Us Text

   Type a longer amount of text into this box – this is a great opportunity to explain your founding story, about yourself/your team, the values of your business, why you do what you do, any plans or major value messages and also, if it makes sense for your business/brand, we suggest ending the message with a short, bolded, call-to-action message – e.g. Michelle is available to answer any questions you have – call now 09 123 4567!

   If you like you can also add additional photos here, or some customers enjoy embedding introduction videos for their business here which can be a nice touch.

6. Product Categories

   Simply enter in a few different Categories that the Products you sell will fall into. No need to be exhaustive now, we can come back into Dazzly and edit it again and re-publish shortly.

7. Products

8. Logo

   This is a bit longer, but we need to ensure we get all the information for each Product that we need

   • Product Name – e.g: ‘Seashell Natural Necklace’
   • Main Image – the primary image displayed with this Product
   • Product Price (including tax) - enter the product price inclusive of any taxes applicable.
   • Add Additional Product Images – upload any additional Product images. We recommend showing photos of the Product variations if any exist.
   • Product Status – In-Stock if you’re ready to sell. Out-of-stock otherwise. The Product will display on the website regardless.
   • Feature this Product on the Home page – Select ‘Yes’ if you it to appear.
   • Product options/variations - Enter each Product variation e.g. Material - Standard, Hemp, Eco
   • Product Description - Type in as much information about the Product as you can in this section. Including additional photos and embedded videos if at all possible. This is a lengthy Product description and you will eventually want to come back and add-in keywords here so that users can find you through search. For now, write a longer description, and you can come back and subsequently edit it.
   • Short Product Description - An abbreviated version of the Product Description, primarily used for SEO/ranking purposes – keep it within 160 characters and try to include a keyword once.
   • Save your Product and add-in a few more (some featured, some not) to get a better idea

9. Publish

   Click the green button ‘Publish Now’

10. Logo

Once publishing has finished you can preview your website and then return to Dazzly to update and re-publish it any time! Note that your Dazzly website does not look like any other website you’ve seen before, by utilizing your logo (if you had one) and the unique colour scheme you suggested, Dazzly has populated many different sections and regions of the website with variations of the colours as well. Along with your unique photos (or stock photos if you took advantage of one of our free libraries) then you will have a unique looking website design that no-one else has!

Are you dazzled by our software? We hope this small instructional has helped you take one more step forward on your entrepreneurial journey.

Were you just reading along? Then try it now by using our Ecommerce Store Template today!

If you’re still not confident that you can setup a website and start selling things yourself online now then we suggest you give our friendly, New Zealand based support team a phone call now and discuss your issue with us directly. We have helped so many business owners regardless of their region, existing IT or design abilities – we want to help everyone get started on their business journeys today using dazzly.

The development team at Dazzly have moved the weight of the earth to get Ecommerce available for use in Q1 2021. We’re extremely proud of the effort they have put in and what they have been able to achieve in such a short time. With that being said, we’re very excited to announce the release of the first Dazzly Ecommerce template.

This is the template that you have been waiting for. Using the easy-to-use Dazzly interface that customers love, they’re now able to add Products in a simple manner and set the appropriate price, description, variations, images and other information they need to sell online. You can categorise items and feature them on the Home page. And there’s a generous amount of room on your home page to write about your business and brand values – because its not just about selling great products. Just like all of our templates at dazzly, you can go from idea to up-and-running in a matter of minutes – and yes – that includes also receiving payments! Checkout orders can be made using credit card, Afterpay, cash and bank transfer.

You can add variations to your products such as size and colour in-order to ensure that each customer can see your full range within one page.

Ecommerce Store also supports contactless Click & Collect functionality for your retail store and we’re really looking forward to seeing the results this can deliver across the country. If your business has suffered loss of revenue from a lack of Click & Collect functionality then this is the perfect template for you. Take orders online and provide customers with a unique ID and pick-up time to facilitate their click and collect order. It also allows delivery functionality, which could truly be transformative for your business. The possibilities are endless! Get up and running and protect your retail business from COVID-19 and lockdown revenue loss with this amazing template.

So if you’re looking for the best New Zealand made option to create an online store then don’t look past Dazzly website builder – it's free to try – so give it a go right now!

Opening your first Ecommerce Store

Creating your first website to sell products is really easy with dazzly. All it takes is a little motivation to get started and Dazzly does the hard work for you.

Will it look like all the other online shopping websites?

No. Creating your own website through Dazzly will allow you to customise many aspects of the website including the colour scheme which will give a very distinct first impression. Customers that visit your website will also see images of your Products which often grabs their attention and raises their interest to purchase.

How easy is the Dazzly ecommerce website builder to use?

We have customers that have created their own online shopping websites from scratch using dazzly. They had no previous web design skills and did not consider themselves overly creative yet they were able to make a high-quality online store for their business in under an hour. We think Dazzly is the best website builder for its ease of use and small learning curve.

Try Dazzly today and see the difference!

Any questions? Call 0800 112 942 or email support@dazzly.co.nz for free New Zealand support 24/7 to help you get started.

The main thing when considering a tool that makes ecommerce websites is the suitability to your specific business. Does the platform allow you to create Products similar to yours? Can it manage your online inventory in a manner that is suitable for your stock? There are many website makers, but only a small proportion of them support shopping carts and taking payments (eCommerce). We have put together this guide of the most important considerations when choosing an ecommerce website builder for your business.

How to test an ecommerce website maker

1. Sign-up for an account

   You should expect to be offered a free trial to test the software, many providers will require a credit-card up-front to start your trial offering. Note that you can remove your credit card from the Payment Method before the trial finishes.

2. Evaluate the trial length

   If you’re testing a number of website builders then make a mental note of the length of each trial in order to ensure you have enough time to give each a go. Evaluate the ease of use, functionality and suitability of the tool to your business.

3. Attempt to add Products to the website

   Somewhere within the ecommerce website maker interface, you will find the ability to add products. In the process of managing and maintaining your ecommerce store, you will likely spend a lot of time on this screen. Take the time to ensure the user interface is seamless, easy and that you understand how the information is being translated through to your website preview.

4. Attempt to add Product Categories to the website

   This step should not be too arduous. Ensure that the Product Category function also suits the range and variety of your Product Categories. Not so much of an issue if you just have one product range or even one hero product, but it can be paramount to ensure this works correctly if you’re a general online store with many different types and categories of products.

5. Attempt to do a basic Stock-take simulation

   Pretend it’s the end of the month and count your physical inventory, then assess how easy it would be to compare that to the stock/inventory count in your ecommerce website control panel. How easy it is to update/correct the stock amount so that customer’s purchase can continue to be facilitated without concern over stock level uncertainty?

6. Attempt to do a paid transaction

   Evaluate the Order Confirmation email and entire experience from the perspective of your customer. How was the overall experience? Am I confident that I will receive the Products I have ordered from your online store? Is there any further information that should be provided to the customer to raise their confidence regarding the process? Is there a complete feedback loop through to final delivery confirmation? Have we offered the Customer all of the payment options that they’d ideally like to use?

7. Launch your website

   Once you’ve experienced the entire process and asked for actual customers to test your website, will you have a very clear picture of the entire experience that your ecommerce website offers. Bare in mind, if you’ve used an ecommerce website maker, you won’t have the most custom website around, but you may have something entirely functional on both desktops and mobile devices. All for only a small monthly fee – that is the magic of the modern website builder platforms.

8. Collect Customer feedback

   Follow up with your customers to collect valuable feedback on how the order went. Ask for a review, testimonial or perhaps a mention on social media.

Card payments

There are many payment facilitation companies that websites can integrate with to process ecommerce transactions. Some also support invoicing and scheduled subscription payments. The ability to take credit-card payments is a very reasonable expectation for anyone wanting to start an online business. It is the most universally accepted method for taking payments worldwide.

Please Note: that you will need to ensure that your ecommerce website maker has support for SSL certificates. This will be required in-order to accept credit-card payments.

Using a website builder platform has a particular advantage for payment integrations in that the hard work is already done for you. You simply need to fill in some basic details about your business, in our case, with Stripe, our payment processor. You can then begin to accept credit-card payments for your Products within minutes of launching your website.

Bank Transfer

A lot of people still like to use traditional payment options, or at least know that the option is there. When it comes to payments, nothing is more straight-forward than doing a bank transfer – especially when it is manually performed. As a vendor, all you need to do is supply your bank account details and a reference, and your customer can manually make the payment transfer and then get in touch to confirm with you. With Dazzly, this is facilitated through simply allowing you to enter your information which is displayed to the customer upon selecting the ‘Bank Transfer’ payment option on checkout.

Cash Payment / Click & Collect

Speaking of traditional ways, nothing is more traditional than paying with cold, hard cash. If the nature of your product dictates that it must be collected in-person, or if that is the experience that your customers desire, then offering the ability for customers to pay in cash is a convenient and straight-forward way to facilitate payment that involves as little technology as possible.

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL)

Hire-purchase, or Buy Now Pay Later website builders have become increasingly possible as these new, trendy, millennial targeted, credit-friendly payment options have exploded in usage across the western world. Where applicable, we highly recommend that you use a quality Buy Now Pay Later provider such as Afterpay to facilitate your transactions and to ensure that your customer’s understand that your brand is on-point and up to date with the latest trends, technologies and payment options. BNPL is very cool in 2024.

PayPal

A favourite among North American and international customers, PayPal changed the scene of online payments forever when it enabled extremely simple account creation and the ability to receive payments from anyone around the globe. Now, your customer’s can now also pay you via PayPal due to the integration with our ecommerce website maker.

What are the transaction fees charged by ecommerce website makers?

On top of a low Pay Monthly fee, we charge 5% on every credit-card transaction (Dazzly/Stripe). There is no charge on Bank Transfers (Manual). There are also often transaction fees for BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) options. There is no additional fee to the customer for using PayPal, however international currency exchange fees may apply.

What is the most convenient way to load my Products into the ecommerce website maker?

Depending on your business, you may have one single hero product, a small range of products or even thousands of products. No matter how many different SKUs you have, a modern ecommerce builder should be able to support your specific inventory and stock needs. If you’re an enterprise customer, you may be able to get internal engineers to manually import your existing products into the platform. Generally speaking, the easiest way to organise all your Product information is into a spreadsheet first. You can also load it directly into Dazzly as you go. With Dazzly, you can save products mid-creation and re-edit them as much as you need to. Additionally, Dazzly is a mobile website builder which means that you can take photos of your inventory directly from your mobile device and upload them straight into Dazzly. This saves all the time, hassle and struggle that you have to go through with other ecommerce website makers that don’t support mobile capabilities.

Is it possible to ship to international countries from my ecommerce store?

Yes, we support a very basic Shipping function which simply allows you to state a shipping cost with a label. Meaning that you can create labels such as “London – Small (under 5kg)” and “London – Medium (5kg-10kg)” and put an associated delivery cost against this label. This system is straight-forward, user-friendly and makes the delivery checkout experience very straight-forward. The customer simply chooses the applicable option for their shipping order based on their location and potentially the weight or configuration of the goods.

Does Dazzly ecommerce website maker support international tax?

As a modern ecommerce website maker we realise that our customers are located over the world. They sell unique goods and services that are in-demand in many different countries and cities all over the world. The ability for our customers to calculate and collect taxes is essential to their ecommerce operation. With dazzly, you have the ability to add-in flat-rate taxes in various international jurisdictions which will allow you to charge your end-customers the appropriate amount of taxed based off of their shipping information (delivery address) and other factors. Although we cannot tell you if tax is applicable to your particular product, service or jurisdiction, the flexibility is there for you the enter the appropriate rate and determine whether a specific product is VAT applicable. If you need specific tax advice, we recommend contacting a local tax professional who is experienced in working with online stores – typically the rules surrounding this aren’t vastly complicated, particularly when you’re just starting out or are at lower levels of operating revenue.

Why is Dazzly the preferred eCommerce website maker?

Dazzly is a great choice when making an ecommerce website because of it's extremely simple process. Simply load in your business information, product information and then launch the website. All of which can be done from your mobile device in one short session. The process is so easy, you can also take care of registering a domain for your ecommerce business and setting up email hosting.

So if you’re looking for a platform that will make opening your online store a breeze, then don’t look past Dazzly as the next option when making an ecommerce website for your business.

Dazzly offers a no credit-card required, free trial to evaluate our ecommerce website maker and see whether it suits your business. We’re so confident that you’ll like our platform that we offer support, assistance and hand holding for anyone that is unsure whether they’ll be able to create, launch and maintain their website. Don’t hesitate to email our friendly website expert team or give us a call and we can answer any questions you have right away.

Customers often ask us: "should I offer customers large discounts to attract them to my shop?". Large sales often for work in-person retail store, but they may not represent your brand well, and they may not even attract anyone new at all (depending on how you get the message out). Having seen many people, from everyday walks of life, start-up their own small product-based businesses, we really suggest utilizing the keep-it-simple approach.

With dazzly, you can setup a single price for your product and also easily setup a single-priced shipping/delivery method for your product. There is no complicated design interface or coding required. Our primary goal is to get businesses up and running. As most businesses have not tried selling their products online previously, a lot of the value for them is just getting a shopping site online and testing out sales of their product to the audience they advertise and announce it to.

If you’re just looking to get your toes wet with an ecommerce store – then Dazzly website builder is certainly the best choice for you. The process is very rewarding and you will be able to view a live preview of your website with only a few minutes being invested into the process. Less time than it takes to send an email or take a piece of clothing from the laundry and hang it out on the line.

Don’t get too hung up on the specifics - just get yourself, your brand, your message and story out there so potential customers can find your online shopping website and start making purchases.

This doesn’t cover the entire gamut of what you need to do to start a business but hopefully it has given you the confidence and boost you need to sign-up and try Dazzly and see what you think of the online store website that you can create in just a few minutes!

Sign up to dazzly now, free to try, no credit-card required, and get your first sale today!

When you’re in the first stages of starting up your product selling business, the last thing you will be wanting to do is add unnecessary complexity to any tasks, especially when you may already be starting to feel overwhelmed with the number of tasks that are accumulating on your TODO list.

Hence when you are selecting which option to pursue when getting a business ecommerce website, you need to decide how much money, time and effort you’re willing to put into this.

Traditional practitioners and many dated articles that are still online will sing the benefits of a combination of Wordpress software and a magnificently cheap hosting provider. What they don’t often tell you is that there is a technical learning curve to getting started with Wordpress. How confident do you feel in procuring hosting services and having to configure and click the right button to ‘deploy your server’? How friendly does that feel on a Saturday afternoon? With no human support in-sight should you go one keystroke off-track.

While the price of Wordpress and cheap website hosting may sound attractive, you will pay the invisible cost of a high amount of effort required to get up and running (and that’s just the server online – let alone the Wordpress configuration, theme editing, and all the rest) – this is a high-effort, potentially low cost “solution”. But does it really work?

Without the input of an experienced web developer your website will likely not be able to carry out its functions in a desirable manner, and will likely feature a poor to average, or under-worked design. It is unlikely to be a highly desirable outcome even with your large time and effort investment.

The other obvious option is to engage a professional website design company, and possibly a website hosting company – their charges can vary heavily so you would be best to get multiple quotes and consultations to get a fair perspective on the local market offerings – then sit down and evaluate all to make a decision. For a decent local website design you can expect to pay over $3,500.00 for a standard website and over $7,000.00 for an e-commerce website – and these are just starting rates. This is fair and OK depending on your situation, it can take a website developer a long time to make these websites, but the truth is that there is a new and exciting option – using an ecommerce website builder to do it yourself within a managed process – no tricky third party services or configuring web servers.

Luckily – there is a New Zealand company that is leading the pack in the website builder technology sphere. Dazzly has an extremely easy-to-use interface that mimics a simple form. You don’t need to learn server hosting or look for a provider of these services, you simply enter your business information, logo, pick some colours, and write a short amount about your products and services, then hit ‘Publish’ and you’re good to go – it really is that simple.

The Website Preview will blow-you-away, you’ll wonder why you ever bothered hauling around Wordpress files or considered learning technical jargon such as SQL, when all you really needed was an easy-to-use piece of software that would do all the creative design work and technical 'under-the-hood' work for you – so you can get back to business. Dazzly respects your time.

Dazzly is a great option for those that have not previously built a website and for those that think they may need a helping hand in the process of doing so. Even though in the end most are capable of filling in the form and information themselves and pressing ‘publish’ – with many completing their first website in minutes or within the hour for multi-page templates.

The hardest step for most was getting started. There’s no up-front cost and no requirement to enter your credit card during sign-up, just face your fears, visit our website, and take the first step yourself right now!

Prepare to save thousands of dollars, tens of hours and many fistfuls of hair by taking the easiest and best option to build a website yourself using the Dazzly ecommerce website builder!

When the first computers, and subsequently first groups of computers were linked together in a “network”, it wasn’t envisioned that people would use them to purchase products online, update and dispatch orders and have all this information communicated in a secure and timely fashion. Yet despite that, we’re able to achieve it. How have commercial businesses offerings changed over the years? How have they advanced the landscape in the website DIY (do-it-yourself) development space? What does the picture look like now? All of this will be answered and more in this brief history of e commerce sites article.

The first two major competitors on the scene for website making tools were Angelfire and Geocities who offered very simple, to the point, form-based building tools and very open-bounded HTML editors which delighted users when putting all sorts of crusty created images and low-frame GIF animations through. It was a creative time, and while the learning curve to use these tools was very low and the speed from idea to online was very high, often what they produced were very budget, websites that left you with a “home-made” feeling – not always the best first impression for a business website. Further to this point we want to mention that our opinion of both of these competitors was that their offerings were commendable for the time of release and we applaud them for their efforts, ingenuity and development at this time, the point of this article is not to put them down at all. We have a lot of respect for their pioneering work.

There was a long gap between the next innovations in this space but it came in the form of Wordpress and other competitors who built their websites based off of popular template themes at the time and in some cases directly off of the Wordpress code-base. These providers often were just user interfaces sitting on top of Wordpress deployments – meaning that you got yesterdays technology under the hood with a nicely presented interface. These businesses have helped perpetuate the notion and feeling that a website maker can only produce a second-tier or sub-standard website and while their predecessors never took it to the highest levels of designs either (albeit very good for their time period) – Dazzly has only just begun to deliver on its next-generation website builder technology.

With dazzly, only the latest website technology and infrastructure are what's under-the-hood, you don’t get yesterdays technology, you get todays - without the huge price tag. We have the ability to upgrade the core of Dazzly to the latest and greatest ensuring you’re never left behind. Once you join the Dazzly family you’re part of a pack of successful entrepreneurs and part of what we carry forward together. The other primary point about Dazzly is that it has the quickest 'idea-to-online' user interface yet. The final core point is that no matter your design skill or ability to draw a straight-line, almost no matter what you put into Dazzly it comes out looking great! Our excellent template engine works to ensure your content is streamlined and well contained within the template regardless of the device. One piece of feedback and we constantly hear is that everything generated (even the first preview example) looks really nice and often blows people away with how far they got with such little up-front effort.

Intrigued? We hope you are. We really wish for you to start your journey on the latest ecommerce site technology and we’ve got it home-made for you here from Auckland, New Zealand.

Try Dazzly to start your first ecommerce site today!