Jump to Section: Store Building | Marketing & SEO | Buying & Selling Websites
Our 2021 Recommendations For Your Store
While building & managing over 180 profitable eCommerce stores, we've used MANY tools & services. Some of them have been great while others left a lot to be desired. What you'll find on this page is a collection of the very best tools & services that we've used for our own stores. If you're interested in building your own eCommerce store or have an existing store that could use a major boost, check out our free online store training!
Niche Selection & Store Building
Create Custom Graphics
At Canva, once you learn their simple interface, you can create unlimited professional graphics of your own, all unique to your brand. They have a massive image & font style gallery at your disposal, so creating pro graphics yourself is a piece of cake! When we talk about creating a logo or sales banners in our free eCommerce training, Canva is our #1 recommendation.
Shopping Cart Platform
Our #1 recommendation for your shopping cart platform, by far, is Shopify. Their solution is as cheap as any professional hosted cart on the web, and they have a user friendly admin interface that allows you to extend your stores with the thousands of add-on apps available in their App Marketplace. When we discuss building our store in our eCommerce course, Shopify in the only cart solution we even mention.
Offer Financing Options
If you sell products for $50+ you'll no doubt increase the conversion rate on your store significantly by offering financing options to your customers! Klarna is our #1 recommendation for offering financing options to visitors on your website. Their solution is easy to set up, there are no sign up or monthly fees (only cost is a small percentage of collected revenue on financed orders), and their team is great to work with!
Domain Name Registration
It honestly doesn't matter much where you register a domain name. But we've come to prefer NameCheap because of their awesome customer support & because private registration is free.
Wordpress Web Hosting
Easy WP Hosting by NameCheap is our favorite hosting solution for Wordpress sites. They're as cheap as anyone, but still ultra reliable and user friendly. If you need to create a corporate website or an Amazon affiliate WP store in order to land suppliers, this is where we recommend hosting.
US Mailing Address
If you live outside the United States but want to build a store that targets the US's HUGE online shopping marketplace, you'll definitely want a US mailing address. We recommend Earth Class Mail.
Logo Design
At CrowdSpring, you can create a project for one low cost and have dozens (or possibly even hundreds) of designers working on your design. You give feedback, they make revisions. It's that simple!
Toll-Free Phone Number
Phone.com is hands-down the best toll-free phone service provider. Plans start at just $9.99/mo and that includes all of the fancy options including extensions, custom greetings, e-fax & conferencing.
Sell The Trend
Sell The Trend is the best product finding tool on the market! We use their tool to find most of the products we build online stores around. Store Coach clients get a free trial & 25% off for life!
Marketing, SEO, & Store Maintenance
SEO Link Building
Link building is hard! Don't resort to spending all your precious work hours on begging other website owners for links! Instead, just lease powerful & relevant links on our massive private site network and watch your site shoot to the top of the rankings!
SEM Rush
SEMrush is seriously unbelievable! It's really the one and only SEO tool you need to streamline and manage your SEO efforts. It's insanely powerful in helping you analyze your competitors, find new keyword and PPC opportunities, track your site's backlinks and domain authority, boost your site's quality score and a whole lot more. It's literally like ten tools in one! If you like useful charts and reports, you'll be giddy about what SEMrush offers!
Newsletter
Every store should utilize a newsletter and/or auto-responder service. Without question, our top recommendation is MailChimp. It's FREE until you've exceeded 2,000 subscribers or 12,000 emails per month.
Content Creation
My Blog Squad doesn't only specialize in blog writing. They also provide product descriptions, buyer's guides & much more. They are quick & efficient and their prices are the best in the industry! If you need content for your website My Blog Squad is our #1 recommendation.
Accounting Software
For most store owners, Wave Accounting will do the job just fine. And it's FREE! Wave is basically a free, simplified, online version of QuickBooks. It lacks a few of the bells and whistles QuickBooks offers but includes everything most small business owners need.
eCommerce Fraud Prevention
It only takes a single fraudulent order to wipe out all profits from ~12 legitimate orders. Don't let this happen to you! Use ClearSale to protect your store from fraud, chargebacks and false declines. Their service typically costs less than 1% of the revenue they cover and protects you against all forms of fraud.
Buying & Selling Profitable Stores
Buying Profitable Online Businesses
If you are looking to buy an already established, profitable online business, look no further than our Website Marketplace. We filter out the scams and garbage sites and only list online businesses that are legitimate, and better than that, we walk you through the due diligence process and offer escrow services so you can verify the legitimacy of a business before paying.
Selling Your Store
We can help you get WAY MORE for your store than you'd be able to get selling it on your own! Using our brokering service will take away a lot of the work involved with selling a website. We've bought and sold dozens and dozens of websites over the last decade and know how to prepare the listing, drive interested parties to it, get maximum exposure, conduct the bidding/due diligence process and ensure a smooth transaction.
Store Coach is an affiliate for many (but not all) of these recommended tools & services, and as such, we earn an affiliate commission for referring customers. That being said, we don't recommend any service we don't truly believe in and use ourselves.