Starting a Website April 16, 2008
Posted by engjake in business.Tags: business, ecommerce, new website, start-up
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Partners and I have started a few ecommerce websites over the years. A couple have been pretty successful, some deceased and a couple more still in climbing the charts. I’ve learned it’s not as easy as people think. It sounds easy, hosting is cheap and there are a lot of shopping carts out there for people to use. With the .com boom back in the day the idea that internet businesses are easy money still lingers. While it is true that you can make a good living operating an internet business, the same is true for a brick and mortar business you open down the street in your home town, I have friends who do it. The truth about both types of businesses is that it takes a lot of work to make them successful.
My cousin emailed me today wondering how I got started because he’d like to try something similar. I’m excited for him because starting a business is fun, challenging and can be rewarding so I gave him the basics to get him going. Later I was talking with my brother Spence about it. Spence and I started an ecommerce site a while ago and before beginning he asked me similar questions. Today he says “If you would have told me all of the work it takes I probably wouldn’t have beleived you and done it anyway. But If I had been able to actually visualize what it would take, there is no way i would have.”
That sounds pretty discouraging. It really does take a lot of work, but any successful business does. I’m so glad I have the businesses I do. There are a lot of advantages to owning your own business. When people ask me how I got started I am happy to share some ideas, but I hope they realize that it won’t happen overnight. I started learning as much as I could about 10 years ago and as my partner at The Plan Collection can tell you, it took us a few years before we were really able to personally benefit from the fruits of our labors.
It’s not as easy as people think but as a wise man once said, “He who wants it does it”.
off the shelf vs. custom code March 27, 2008
Posted by engjake in business, house plans.Tags: business, ecommerce, house plans
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For a small business the off the shelf software is usually the best option. Having started several online businesses I can tell you that even the most robust off the shelf systems may not have exactly what you want. We often end up having to do funky work arounds to get an off the shelf system to work. This is a little furstrating at times but most off the shelf systems are designed for a small business selling simple items like t-shirts or books. If you are selling items with multiple variables or attributes it gets a little more complicated.
As a result, our house plans business would not work with an off the shelf (pre-programmed) system. This is pretty frustrating because there are a lot ofecommerce packages out there that have some really cool features. But, for our house plans website we had to custom write the code so that the user would have an easier, more pleasant experience on our website. The upside is we have a much better user experience, the downside is we are lacking in some marketing and analytics tools that we would otherwise have. It is difficult to find a good quality ecommerce company that will customize the cart to suit your needs at an affordable price. We have searched high and low to find one and you either pay through the nose for a license to start with, the customization costs are rediculous, or both.
So whats the answer? We chose to write our own software so that it was easy to use, and we’re having to use other analytic tools or 3rd party services to get the statistics that we need. You have to decide which is more important to you. With some of my other businesses it made more sense to have all the marketing tools and work around the idiocirocies of the shopping cart, than to pay someone to custom write a website exactly how I wanted it.
