Selling digital and/or physical products online is growing at an astronomical rate.
The number of people buying online has also increased exponentially in just the last few years, way ahead of what was originally predicted.
It’s a great time to start your own online store and build an online business while working from home.
In this post, we will look at GrooveKart in detail and how to use it to build your own online store selling any product you can think of.
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What is GrooveKart?
GrooveKart is a comprehensive eCommerce platform that allows you to sell your own physical and/or digital products.
It can also help you setup print-on-demand and/or dropshipping stores easily.
GrooveKart offers one of the best online store experiences, with features such as an intuitive cart system, customisable product pages, advanced shipping options and reporting.
You can think of GrooveKart as a cheaper Shopify alternative.
In addition to that, GrooveKart allows you to:
- Create unlimited stores.
- Import your existing Shopify stores.
- Allows you to integrate with other Groove tools within the Groove ecosystem.
You can get started with Groove by signing up for a free Groove account. If you don’t have a Groove account already, go ahead and click the button below to sign up now.
GrooveKart vs Shopify
Shopify is a dedicated online store builder and is perhaps one of the most used builders for e-Commerce stores.
It has high converting themes, super fast loading times and an easy-to-use intuitive system for running and managing an online store.
GrooveKart is a newer player on the block that also does pretty much everything that Shopify does. It aims to become an even better version of Shopify while being very affordable.
GrooveKart is not quite there yet in terms of the overall stability and feature set of Shopify but will no doubt get there very soon as their development team is really active and the overall Groove ecosystem is growing at a rapid pace.
Also bear in mind, that you can build unlimited stores with GrooveKart and any sale you make is 100% yours, unlike Shopify which charges small fees for each sale (unless you use their in-house Shopify payments feature).
Another benefit of GrooveKart is that you can integrate with the other tools available in the Groove suite to create a truly powerful online store. For instance, you can make use of GroovePages to design attractive and high converting landing pages.
With Shopify, it’s a little bit more difficult unless you are a HTML/CSS expert. Users also tend to use something like ClickFunnels as an additional tool and integrate with Shopify. However, as you know, costs can climb when you use these 2 tools in conjunction and is best for e-Commerce stores that make a killing each month.
Groovekart tutorial
Follow these steps to create an online store using GrooveKart.
Login to Groove.cm.
On the dashboard, you can either go directly to GrooveKart in the “Quick Links” area.
Alternatively, you can hover over the Groove logo and click GrooveKart. This is also where you can see the entire suite of all Groove products.
Then click on “Add New Store”.
Give your store a name. This will create a URL for your site as <yoursite>.groovekart.com. If you prefer to use your own domain, you can also do that later. In general, it’s usually a better idea to first build out your site under the groovekart domain and then later swap it out with your own domain.
If you’ve found an available domain, then go ahead and press “Create Store”.
Then sit back and relax while your store is being built. Note that if you are a Premium member, you can create another store after waiting 7 days. If you are a Free member, you will have to wait 30 days to create another store. This is not only to prevent people from flooding the platform with stores, but also to help you focus on your one store rather than having multiple stores and procrastinating.
You may need to wait a few minutes for your store to be ready. Once it’s ready, you can hover over the hamburger icon and select “Storefront” to have a look at what your store looks like.
Congrats! You’ve built your very own store on GrooveKart with only the click of a few buttons.
Take some time to explore the site and test out everything from the perspective of a customer.
You can view some of the sample products and also try adding a few products to the cart. You can also go to the checkout page and see that all technicalities have already been setup for you.
So now let’s go ahead and customize our store.
Go back to the previous tab and select “Admin Dashboard” this time.
You will then be presented with a dashboard showing you basic analytics of your entire store.
If you need more advanced analytics, then Google Analytics is your best friend.
You can do that by going to Settings –> Pixels, Feeds, Embed Codes –> Google Analytics. However, we won’t go into it in detail here and might leave this for another post.
The easiest way to setup your entire store is by using the in-built wizard.
Press the Home icon on the top left.
Then follow each of the steps in the “Start Selling” section, starting with adding store details.
Press “ADD Store Details”. Then go through the 6 steps until you are ready to launch your store. Each of the steps should be intuitive and easy to follow.
Once you’ve done the launch step. Go and finish off the last 4 steps to get your store ready to go live.
Here is where you also link up your custom domain if you have one.
It is highly recommended that you have your own custom domain rather than the “.groovekart.com” subdomain. It looks a lot more professional and trustworthy to see a store that reads as mystore.com rather than mystore.groovekart.com.
At the end of the day, your customers are real people who may never have heard of you and are trusting you to deliver products in exchange for their money. Having a custom domain can help gain that trust.
Once you’ve followed all the 10 steps, you now have your very own store that you can start promoting and getting people to visit.
Creating a dropshipping store with GrooveKart
To create a dropshipping store with GrooveKart, go to the Products tab on the left and select “POD & Dropshipping”.
Here is where you can integrate with dropshippers and print-on-demand service providers that already have integration with GrooveKart.
The most popular dropshipping provider for a lot of dropshippers is AliExpress. This is due to the ability to drop ship virtually millions and millions of different products in almost any product category.
To enable that, go to the tile that says “GK Ali-Connect” and press “Learn More”. Then just toggle the slider at the bottom to enable. You can also enable “Dropified” for importing AliExpress products.
If you’re store is a print-on-demand type of store, the most popular one is Printful. The best thing about Printful is that they would fulfill orders locally to the customers once printed. Thus, there’s no crazy month long waiting times or absurdly huge shipping fees.
We will cover dropshipping and print-on-demand stores in more detail in another post.
Will I make sales with GrooveKart?
The success of any online store is not dependent on which store builder you use or how fancy your store looks. You can still have 0 sales even if you have the best products and the highest converting site in the world.
The number one factor when it comes to making sales online is getting traffic. If you’re able to consistently get traffic everyday, you will definitely make some sales, even if your store doesn’t look that great.
So, to answer the question, yes, you can absolutely make sales with GrooveKart. However, you need to know the basics of digital marketing and driving traffic to ensure your success.
Too many people give up after they create their store because they don’t realize how difficult it is to run an online store.
Read this article to learn how to get started with driving traffic using free methods which will be useful if you’re just getting started withe online selling: 12 Best Ways To Drive Traffic Without Spending A Dime.
That’s it! I hope you found this GrooveKart tutorial and post helpful. Give GrooveKart a try for yourself by signing up for a free Groove account below and follow the steps above to see if it’s worth your time.
