Help me choose the correct ecommerce platform
Details:
100% drop shipping sales.
Thousands of available SKU's many with variations in size and color. I won't use all available SKU's as I only want to sell the top shelf products.
Ratings and review plug in's. I want the community of shoppers to leave reviews and rate products so that the cream rises to the top.
Multiple distributors (currently 3)
Absolutely need the ability to import CSV files to populate products.
Absolutely need the ability to update inventory from the distributor several times a day. Some sort of automated inventory updater plugin would be great. Again this will be CSV file based as far as I know. I have no problem doing this manually at first, but the goal is to have this be as hands off as possible.
I'm currently calculating shipping based upon weight. I've toyed with a flat rate option to draw in shoppers.
I need to include subcategories under major categories.
Ability to utilize my own payment processing company.
Social media buttons.
Easy to use and set up as I'm pretty new to this. I figured out Squarespace pretty quickly. I want to do this all myself so I know how it all works.
Background information:
Pure dropshipping website. I have a full time job and I'm wanting to automate as much as possible. I have no issues with placing orders with my distributors manually at this point, but I'd like the ability to automate or outsource that in the future.
I've already posted a couple of times about my failure to research before building a website. I went with Squarespace. Squarespace forces me to use Stripe for payment processing, Stripe's terms of service hamper my ability to sell some of my most in demand products. Squarespace has no way for me to import products directly from my distributors or import inventory levels. In order to import products I'd have to import them to Big Cartel, Shopify, or Esty first.... which makes zero sense.
Basically I dove in head first and then realized Stripe would hinder me a bit, but I pressed on. Then I realized I would have to manually enter all of the products, variations, size, weight, colors. Which I spent hours doing. The final nail in the coffin is having to open up two browsers, one with the distributor and one with my store, and go through the products 1 by 1 updating the inventory levels. Each. And. Every. Day.
So. Now I'm looking to take these lessons and adapt and overcome.
Feel free to include any advice for this business model, or to add features you think I will need.
Thank you in advance!
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