Commerce has been part of the fabric of human society for thousands of years. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus suggests that retail originated in Asia Minor in the 7th millennium BC. ¹ Since then, we’ve made countless advancements in the art of buying and selling. One of the most significant of those is without a doubt the advent of eCommerce, a new kind of trading that began with the sale of a single CD by an economics graduate named Dan Kohn in 1994. ²

But as much as eCommerce expanded the possibilities of trade, it hasn’t always been the most accessible option for people who could benefit from it most: small business owners. There are barricades to success for SMBs on major eCommerce platforms, which box in and restrict their seemingly limitless potential. New tools and experiences are starting to change that dynamic, but before we look at these solutions, let’s examine the problem a bit more.

The Knowledge Gap

WordPress is a remarkably flexible, powerful, and popular platform. But for a busy small business owner, setting up an online store and managing shipping, inventory, marketing, payment options and more can be daunting. The tools are there, and the potential is there, but if small businesses can’t take advantage of those resources because of time limitations or the complexities of the platform, how useful are they, really?

It’s too easy to layer on complexities in the name of robustness and feature-richness without tailoring those features to the end user. (Who doesn’t love a lengthy features-and-benefits sheet?) We must always consider the small business owner’s perspective. Do they need more solutions, or do they need the right solutions? Is their onboarding experience straightforward or overloaded with information? Are the included features the ones that best address their requirements, or the ones that we think are neat internally, or just differentiate us on paper?

The key here is to find a balance between depth, power and flexibility, and user-friendliness and ease of use. So how do you do that?

Our Approach

When we started building our new Bluehost eCommerce product, we looked for a way to leverage all of our capabilities to give our customers the most value and empower them with a simplified, flexible eCommerce solution on WordPress. We wanted our customers to fully leverage the power and versatility of WooCommerce and its suite of extensions and make full use of our YITH plugins.

But we knew that we had to start where the customer starts: with onboarding. We committed to building a user-friendly, guided onboarding experience to get users up and running and walk them through their essential online store functionality, like setting up payment processing, handling taxes and shipping, and managing product inventory. We felt that this was the essential, foundational step to set our customers up for success.

From that starting point, they can start to take advantage of the real core of our eCommerce experience, built around our exclusive pre-installed YITH plugins. This suite of plugins includes features like gift cards, appointment booking, product searching, and filtering, and customer account creation, among other options. Our thought here was that by hand-selecting and pre-installing these plugins, we would save our customers time both in the searching and setup phase and when updating their plugins while reducing the risk of security breaches and compatibility issues.

We also wanted to give our customers options – for example, the ability to sell on multiple marketplaces, like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay. One of the best benefits of eCommerce is that it opens a whole new world of sales opportunities for small business owners, and it was important to us for our customers to have that freedom to sell their products where they want to sell them and manage their inventory across all those platforms from a single dashboard.

The Future of Commerce

Just as we look back on those ancient, first days of commerce through the lens of so much history, these still-early days of eCommerce will be viewed from a perspective defined by what happens next. At Bluehost, we believe in investing in a future for eCommerce characterized by a total focus on the end-user experience and maximizing our user’s valuable business outcomes while empowering them to sell online with the greatest of ease and trust.

Small businesses we support play multiple roles and changing technology and shifting market dynamics continue to create challenges and put even more pressure on their valuable time. They need the kind of online selling platform built for everyone, regardless of their experience level. When it comes to selling on WordPress, that solution is here, and now it’s up to us to continue to grow it and improve it.

Someone made the first retail sale in history. Someone completed the first online transaction. And someone will make history in untold ways thanks to the increasingly accessible eCommerce tools available on the market today.

Online selling is now for everyone. We should all look forward to supporting WordPress users and businesses as they build their dream and work towards their “Firsts.”

1. Herodotus (1858, p.56) “The Histories”. Translated from Greek by G. Rawlinson. United States: Alfred A. Knopf.
2. Magazine, Smithsonian. “What Was the First Thing Sold on the Internet?” Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution, November 30, 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-was-first-thing-sold-internet-180957414/.