All Blogs · Business Operations · 1 comment ·Sep 04, 2020

CommentSold vs Shopify - or can you have both?

*Updated 4/10/22

Hey girl! Today we're talking about comment selling on social media, and the best platforms for your biz!

We talk to a lot of businesswomen who are killing it on social media - but one of the biggest headaches we hear a lot about social media selling is how time-consuming it is to do everything manually when you’re making sales in your groups.

But then CommentSold came along and gave us the perfect solution.

But lots of you have questions about when and how to use CommentSold:

❔ Should you be using Shopify instead?

❔ Can you use both?

❔ Can you switch?

❔ What’s better?

Today I’m here to answer your comment selling questions!!!

VIDEO MORE YOUR JAM? WATCH IT HERE:

What is CommentSold?

CommentSold allows customers to purchase directly through comments on Facebook or Instagram. Comment Sellers can then go live, post videos or images with their products and guide buyers to claim their item by commenting “sold” on the post.

A little background: CommentSold was founded in 2017 by a boutique owner and her husband. The husband noticed that his wife was making a killing selling clothes on social media and decided to help her scale the business by developing, you guessed it: CommentSold - an automated sales process with no more manual invoicing.

Since then they've also introduced apps and a webstore option to their product line.

CommentSold Updates March 2022:

Hot Mess will have a separate blog coming April 2022

- Tik-Tok & Instagram Live/Reel Selling

- Facebook Messenger push notifications

What are the advantages of CommentSold?

Saves time if you're selling in FB groups, so you can gather sales in one place rather than pushing to a separate platform
Boost engagement and sales (and reach!) in your group
Works with posts or live videos
Great mobile app with helpful push notifications
Good customer experience with lots of care reps
You don't need a website (technically - although we do recommend having one!)
New 2022: Ability to CommentsSell on Instagram.

Downsides of CommentSold

The functionality is limited - particularly the webstore which is like a landing page. Other than the mobile app, within your CommentSold webstore there are no apps, no themes, very few integrations, no plug-ins, and there's no coding access on the main page.
Limited, non customizable email marketing integration or retargeting.
Limited ability to scale your business.... Of course you can scale your business with CommentSold (that's what it was designed for after all!), but it's not quite the same as scaling with your own website. CommentSold is only scalable as your ability to push out more and more content and increase your visibility of that content is (versus driving traffic to your website).
The FB Pixel not very sophisticated - you won't be able to track your data in a way that will be useful to optimize your ads.
No existing POS compatibilities. One way sync from Square POS.

Need help optimizing your website to increase your revenue?
That's what we do!

LET'S CHAT

What about Shopify?

Okay, so let's now look at some of the advantages and downsides of choosing Shopify.

Reasons to choose Shopify:

If you want to scale outside your Facebook Group
If you need a robust website
If you are very particular about how your site looks aesthetically
If you want more detailed analytics on the people visiting your page
If your marketing is bit more advanced: i.e you are running Facebook ads and want to do proper retargeting
If you want to customize your website, choose your own themes, apps and integrations.
Great POS integrations industry wide

Are there any downsides to Shopify?

If your business is mainly in FB groups, you might not need to complicate things with Shopify - just yet! (Again, we always recommend a website!)
Switching from CommentSold to Shopify would require you to retrain your customers on a whole new platform
Shopify integrates with CommentSold - but you need to have Shopify first, it doesn’t work the other way round
Some coding knowledge is required for fancier features on Shopify! And that’s not for everyone...

CommentSold vs Shopify: Our recommendation

It really comes down to your business goals.

If you’re running ads or want to scale or want a nice website - Shopify
If you’re selling well from your FB group and that is your priority - CommentSold

☞ Our official recommendation: HAVE BOTH!

We recommend having Shopify as your main site, with a landing page and you can run ads and organic traffic to it.

If you have a FB group, then definitely have CommentSold for this so you can look after your customers really well in there. This means no manual invoicing and managing orders and inventory - let Shopify and its integration with CommentSold do that for you!

Then you’re all set to scale, baby!

If you're ready to get started with CommentSold, make sure you take advantage of their 30 day trial. Claim yours here!

But if you driving traffic from your group to your site is more your jam, definitely check out my done-for-you Strategy Pack Bundle for all your website marketing needs!

Here at Hot Mess, we have a lot of love for both these platforms, but we know it can get confusing out there.

Hopefully, this guide has helped you get clear about what each platform does best, which one might be best for you, and how they can actually work together!

Let us know in the comments what you think of this content (did it help you?), or let us know if you’ve got a burning question!