I had a website for years, but really didn't do much with it, much less try to sell things through it. I'd always post on a few social media platforms and pay for a handful of "classifieds" memberships on some of the well known forums (including this one). Sales was always more of a "message me and we'll go from there".
I recently decided to start listing some things on my website (I use bluehost to host, wordpress for the layout, and woocommerce for the e-commerce plugin), and I have to say, it's made a world of difference to ease (and quantity) of sales. Yes, there are fees, but everything costs money now days. From what I can tell, there's really not a tremendous difference between most of the bigger players as far as hosting, site design and e-commerce platforms go. They all charge fees, and their user-friendliness is usually proportional to how big the fees are, which is usually only 2 or 3% of sales.
If I can't figure something out, there's usually a youtube video or a blog post about my issue somewhere. I've come across a few minor inconveniences here and there, but at my level, they're not really a deal breaker or something to get too hung up about.
As far as whether or not to pay somebody or do it yourself, that's up to you. If you get a good web designer, I'd say they're easily worth what they charge, and I do believe it will pay for itself.
On the other hand, I'm a cheap skate, so I just decided to wing it myself for now. I do need to make some tweaks and design changes to my own site, but for now, it gets the job done.
