How to add a buy and sell widget on blogger

You may already have a Blogspot blog, powered by Google, and want to expanblogger.comd its possibilities through a webstore. (Blogspot is the domain name for Google's Blogspot blog hosting service.) Or perhaps you would like to launch a blog, and see no reason not to jump into selling products while you're at it. Unlike a website that you design for the purpose of e-commerce, your Blogspot store keeps the focus on blogging as you add e-commerce functionality to it. Google has some internal tools and programs to assist you, or you can turn to third parties to start you off as a merchant.

Your "Merch"

You can sell virtually anything on your Blogspot store, provided that the products you sell are relevant to your blog. If you write a yoga blog, you could sell yoga classes through your store; if you have written a cookbook companion to your food blog, you can make e-book downloads available through your e-commerce-enabled blog. Bloggers can feature all kinds of tangible items on their blogs, such as scrapbook supplies, skincare products, T-shirts or jewelry -- whatever represents you or your specialty.

Use Google Checkout Gadget

To add online store functionality to your Blogspot blog, you can use tools provided by Google in the form of a Google Checkout Gadget. To add the gadget to your blog, you first have to sign up for Google Checkout. Once you do so, you keep track of inventory on a spreadsheet and finally place the gadget onto your blog.

Apply to Join the Google Trusted Stores Program

To further the potential of your store that is associated with your Blogspot blog, you can apply to be part of the Google Trusted Stores Program. Google awards stores that consistently offer shoppers good customer service with a badge that acts as a vote of confidence to shop. Shoppers are protected with $1,000 lifetime protection per shopper and merchants with the badge gain new business. Beau-coup, the online gifts retailer, saw sales jump by 8.6 percent after initiation of the program.

Use a Store Template for Your Blog

You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You can use existing store templates that are already set up on the Blogger platform. Examples of these are Shopping Cart, Blogger Store and Simplex Eshop. For the latter, you will need to download the template file on its website; open the file in a word editor, where you can adjust settings such as payment method, currency and shipping. You upload the edited template to Blogger and go to the dashboard, where you can post products to the shop.

Add an e-Commerce Plugin

With e-commerce plugins like Ecwid, you can place e-commerce elements strategically throughout your Blogspot blog to make your blog store shopper-ready. Within Blogger, you create a page in HTML mode and copy various widget codes provided by Ecwid to it, then publish the page. Depending on which codes you choose to include, you could add shopping components such as a search engine, products browser, categories tabs and a shopping bag onto your blog. The way the shop looks will be affected by the theme you selected for your blog.