Client has a small home dessert business. She wants to have an option for online ordering. What's the best option?
Webflow eccommerce?
Or is there another software that might be free that we can either embed or just link to her Webflow site?
do you know what POS (Point of Sale) system she is using? Those systems usually have an online component is likely your best bet for online ordering. If she doesn't have a POS system, I would recommend something like Square - which again will also have an online component. You'll be hard pressed to find a free option though.
She doesn't have any sort of POS. Her current website is on wix, and we are moving that over to webflow.
She currently does orders manually via email
okay yeah, Square would be her most cost effective and scalable solution - she can start with a simple card reader for in-person, she can send invoices via email, and she could setup online ordering. Eventually should could buy their full POS system if she has a brick and mortar shop - iPad plus cash register, and she could just plug right into that without having to spin up a whole new product catalog or inventory system. I don't know how dynamic or static bakeries are with their inventories though I would imagine very dynamic though.
She's planning on using the online ordering only for holiday season, so people can order for their holiday parties and then she can close the ordering at her deadline date to make sure she can handle all the orders.
the simpler approach would be to just level up her process shes already doing for email and just turn that into a form
customer would give all the details, they'd get an email, she sends an invoice, they pay the invoice, the product gets created.
cool! but how would that work if the client is selecting things on a regular webflow form?
hmm yeah I mean whatever decisions you would need to make in order to spin up an ecommerce store, are the same ones you'd need to do a stripe buy now button
yeah I think webflow e-commerce is fine, I just think it'll be short lived - I don't know how tech savvy she is but once you start to get 5-10 products in webflow e-commerce, it starts to get pretty tedious to manage. Something like Square would actually scale with her business but thats also just a fault of mine - I tend to think about scaling too soon.
She's not ready for online ordering just yet, but I want to build her informational site in a way that she can scale to it easily
yeah, I've done that path before - build all in webflow and then upgrade to something else later - it could work
I don't understand. I want to build it already on a platform that will eventually work for her selling online so she doesn't have to start from scratch, unless there's an easy way to transfer?
right - yeah I was confirming that your mindset can work - I've done it. I had a laser engraving client that was just starting out with 5-10 products max, no customers. We started with a simple website, and a contact form. 3 months later, we built them an e-commerce store using Webflow E-Commerce. And then eventually when they had either 100 orders a week or over 50 products, we were going to migrate to Shopify. And they knew all of this before we even started on the simple landing page. And they've been a pretty loyal client ever since as well.
