Digital Marketing & E-commerce

Lesson

This is the module where being a developer works against you. You can build a store. The question is whether you should, and for anything involving payments, tax and fraud the answer is almost always no — not because it is hard to write, but because it is expensive to keep correct as tax rules, card standards and fraud patterns change underneath you.

Hosted platforms are what they are because someone has to maintain PCI compliance, VAT rates across jurisdictions, and a checkout that works on nine-year-old phones. Renting that is not a compromise, it is the sensible allocation of your attention.

The order the setup goes in

Most first stores are built in the wrong order, and the wrong order is expensive because the theme work gets thrown away when the catalogue turns out not to fit it. Products and payments first; appearance last.

Decide what you are selling and how it is priced — including whether it ships, and where to.
Create the store and add the products, with real descriptions and real images.
Set up payments, tax and shipping, and place a test order end to end.
Write the policy pages — returns, delivery, contact. Missing ones cost sales and, in the EU, are a legal problem.
Then pick and adjust the theme, once you know what the catalogue actually looks like.
Connect the domain, and only then let it be found: analytics on, and the search engines let in.

What a product page has to answer

A product page is not a description, it is a set of answers to the questions standing between someone and their card. A page that "looks nice" but leaves one of these unanswered will underperform an ugly page that answers all of them.

What is it, in the first line, in the words a customer would use rather than the ones you use internally.
What does it cost, including delivery — a surprise at checkout is the single biggest cause of abandonment.
What do I get exactly: size, format, duration, what is and is not included.
What does it look like, from more than one angle, at a size worth looking at.
Why should I believe you: reviews, a client name, a guarantee, anything that is not your own adjective.
What if it is wrong: returns, support, how to reach a human.
What do I do next — one obvious action, not three competing ones.

Platform or site builder

Shopify is a commerce platform with a website attached. Wix is a website builder with commerce attached. The distinction decides the choice: if the catalogue, inventory, variants and shipping rules are the complicated part, you want the commerce platform. If you are selling three things beside a portfolio and the site is the point, the builder is less machinery to carry.

Tools in this module

Shopify

Build One Product Page That Could Take Money

Mark done

Shopify is the default platform for selling online: catalogue, variants, inventory, checkout, payments, tax and shipping, with a theme system on top.

You are not here for the theme. You are here to see how much of the work is in the parts that are not visible — the variant that changes the price, the shipping rule that only applies outside the country, the tax setting that is wrong until you set it.

Building a product page in a real commerce platform shows you the fields a serious store needs. Even if you never sell on Shopify, that field list is the specification for any store you build or review afterwards.

Your mission

Start a Shopify free trial and build one mock product page for a digital product you would actually sell — a template, a component library, a small tool. Fill in every field: title, description, images, price, variants.

Start the Shopify trial

What price did you set, and why? Then check your page against the seven questions from the lesson and name the one it answers worst.

If the price came from "what feels reasonable", say so — that is the honest answer and it is worth noticing.

Wix

Spend Five Minutes in a Drag-and-Drop Editor

Mark done

Wix is a website builder where you position elements directly on a canvas. It has commerce features, but its centre of gravity is the site rather than the catalogue.

For a developer it is a strange experience: enormously fast for the first screen, and increasingly awkward as you ask for things a canvas does not model well — consistent components, responsive rules, anything repeated across pages.

Knowing what these builders are genuinely good at tells you when to recommend one instead of quoting for a build. A client who needs four pages and will edit them weekly is often better served by Wix than by anything you would write, and saying so builds more trust than taking the job.

Your mission

Start a free Wix site and spend five minutes with the drag-and-drop editor on a sample page. Try to change something structural — not just text — and notice where it fights you.

Open Wix

Did Wix feel easier or harder than coding your own site by hand? Name one thing it did faster than you could, and one thing that would drive you out of it.

Quiz

Recap

Before you move on, the things worth keeping:

Renting a commerce platform buys continuous compliance and maintenance, which is why hand-building a checkout is usually the wrong call.
Set up in order: products and payments first, a test order before anything is public, theme work last.
A product page is a set of answers — what it is, what it costs in total, what you get, what it looks like, why to believe you, what if it is wrong, what to do next.
Surprise delivery costs at checkout abandon more carts than high delivery costs shown early.
Shopify is commerce with a site attached; Wix is a site with commerce attached. Pick by which part is complicated.