Moving to online sales
Hey everyone, I own a small homebrew supply store specializing in wine and beer making supplies. Recently, we’ve seen a decline in in-store traffic, so I’m looking to expand into the online market. I’m interested in creating an e-commerce website and would…
Hey everyone, I own a small homebrew supply store specializing in wine and beer making supplies. Recently, we’ve seen a decline in in-store traffic, so I’m looking to expand into the online market. I’m interested in creating an e-commerce website and would love to hear your recommendations. Would you suggest using Square, Shopify, or another platform? If you’ve had experience with any of these, I’d appreciate your insights on what works best for a small business. Thanks in advance!
Collected discussion
Moderator Announcement Read More » Friendly Reminder r/smallbusiness is a question and answer subreddit. Ask a question about starting, owning, and growing a small business and the community answers. Posts that violate the rules listed in the sidebar will be removed. Please do not conduct market research on our community. We are not your focus group and asking us about our pain points, needs, what is hardest about X, etc. is not asking about how small business works or for real help with running your small business. These posts are subject to removal and given the community's disgust with the constant spamming of these posts you might just destroy your brand and contaminate your company search results. Seeing this message does not mean your post was automatically removed. If you asked about pain points or are directly or indirectly promoting a product please remove your post. Come back to post an honest question or give a knowledgeable response to someone else's question and leave your company name in your own profile. We can tell if you know what you're doing and the community can reach out if they need to. We welcome honest question posts, especially from newcomers. Thank you for your post. I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
For a small specialty store, I would choose the platform based less on the feature checklist and more on how much operational work you want to own. Shopify is usually the more flexible long-term storefront, while Square can be simpler if your in-store inventory and payments already live there. The cost of migrating later is real, so map your current checkout, inventory, shipping, and payment workflow before deciding. I would start with a narrow online catalog rather than putting every item up at once. Pick the products that are easy to ship and have repeat-purchase potential, then measure completed orders, average order value, shipping margin, and repeat customers. Your existing customers can also tell you which bundles or supplies they would actually buy online, which is more useful than trying to guess from general ecommerce advice.
Shopify's usually the better call over Square for a store like yours. Square's fine if you're already using their POS in-store, but it's more limited for variants, bottle sizes, kits, ingredient bundles, stuff homebrew supplies need a lot of. One thing worth thinking about too, homebrew customers reorder the same stuff a lot. Making reordering fast, saved carts, quick reorder buttons, matters more for keeping people coming back than the platform itself honestly.
I sell on both. Square in the physical stores, Shopify online. One thing that saves you later: give everything a SKU and keep it identical on both sides. Every "sync problem" I ever had was actually a SKU problem.