Start an Online Store

Is This for You?

The Ideal Candidate

I am going to describe a fictional person who is the ideal candidate to succeed at building a successful online business.  Let’s call her Jenny. 

Jenny is 35.  She runs a home business selling hand made baby carriers.  Everyone she knows loves them.  She sells them to all the parents at her church and her kid’s school.  She is starting to get enough orders that she has trained a friend to make them also to keep up the pace.   She recently got a digital camera and took some really nice pictures for a catalogue that she wants to make to show people what she can do. 

Jenny just realized that if she had an online store, she could sell her baby carriers all over the world.  She did some research online and found that there really aren’t that many websites selling anything similar to her product.  The problem is that she really has no idea where to start.  She is not a computer programmer and can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars to pay a professional to build a site for her.  Its not that she is web illiterate.  She is really good with email and has a few dozen pictures of her stuff up on flickr.  Just she has no idea how to build and market a website. 

Someone Who Shouldn’t Waste His Time

George is 55.  He lives in a small town and has an auto parts store.  He sells the same auto parts that you would get at any of the large chains.  His are bit more expensive, but he has built his business on customer service and on being pretty much the only place to go in his area.  Recently a bit Kragen opened up a few miles down the road and his sales are sinking.  Everyone keeps telling him that he should sell stuff online like that kid down the block who is making a fortune selling used CDs on Ebay.  Georges only problem is that he has to get his teenage son to come help him figure out how to send an email.

Why Jenny Can Succeed and George Can’t?

Jenny…

…has what we call a niche product.  This is very important because the internet is the great equalizer.  It will put her in direct competition with every other person in the world who sells baby carriers.   The good thing is that there are only 10 sites on the web that specialize in baby carriers.  Some of the sites look very unprofessional and out of date.  Some of the other ones are all selling the same mass produced products and have no personality.  Jenny has a unique product with a personal touch.  And we are going to show her how to put together a website that looks professional and up to date.

George…

…is selling the same auto parts that 1001 other sites are selling.  In his home town, he has succeeded by selling convenience and a friendly smile.  On the web, his products will be buried on page 42 of the search engine results and will never be seen by much of anyone.  Even if someone does stumble upon his site, he won’t be able to match the prices of the big sites.

Jenny…

…is no tech nerd.  But she does have the basic skills needed to upload files, send emails,  edit pictures in some basic software etc.  She won’t have to be a web expert to get her stuff online, but she will need to have some basic skills.  More importantly she will need to be the kind of person who can figure out something new when it comes along.

George…

…is still figuring out how to program his VCR.  This just isn’t for him.  

Building a Website

So what does Jenny do now?  I would like to suggest that she does what I have done.  In 2004, I was in pretty much the same place.  I had a small store selling Mezuzahs (Those are the little boxes that you may have seen on Jewish people’s doors).  I knew that I could sell them online but I wasn’t quite sure how to get a nice website up and running and how to market it.   

After a year of trial and error and a lot of very late nights I figured out the formula.  Since then I have several orders every single day.  MezuzahStore.com has actually become my largest source of income.  In fact a year ago I moved to Israel and now the website provides most of my family’s income (not a small feat for a family of 7).  The nicest thing about it is waking up in the morning and seeing how many orders I got while I was sleeping! 

Web Hosting Account and Domain Name

Jenny needs to get a web hosting account and a domain name.  There are literally thousands of companies out there that do this.  The most important thing is to get a web host that has a very high rate of ‘uptime’.  If your site is constantly going down, it will frustrate you and your customers but there is someone much more important who it will frustrate.  His name is GoogleBot.  The almighty GoogleBot is the giant computer that crawls all the internet indexing and ranking websites.  If you want to ever have a high search engine ranking you will need a steady host.  If GoogleBot visits your site and it happens to be down because you went with some really cheap web hosting company, your ranking will be penalized.

I would also suggest that Jenny purchases her domain name together with her hosting account.  This will make life a bit easier.  If you buy your domain name elsewhere you will end up having to deal with the technicalities of pointing the name to your server and other stuff that isn’t really so very complicated but who needs it.  Also a lot of companies will offer a discounted or a free domain name with purchase of web hosting.  

Choose your domain name carefully

A domain name, in case you don’t know, is the address that you type in your browser to get to the site.  In my case for example it is MezuzahStore.com. 

Now she may want to choose something like JennyShop.com or JenniesCreations.com.  I understand that but it’s not a good idea.  One of the first things that the search engines look at when they decide what your site is about is your domain name. 

In Jennie’s case, she is selling baby carriers and the goal is that someone who types “baby carriers” into Google will find her site listed as one of the first few.  It will be much easier to make that happen if she chooses a domain like BestBabyCarriers.com or even better, BabyCarriers.com (but that has almost for sure been taken already). 

Jenny should book her domain name for at least two years.  The almighty GoogleBot knows how long your domain name is booked for.  If you book it for the minimum one year, he assumes that you are not really serious and will penalize your ranking.  Pretty scary, huh?

Choosing Software for Her Store

Here is the biggest single thing that I ‘discovered’ that allowed me to build MezuzahStore.com.  It is called open-source software.  For our purposes that means Free Software.  Open Source is software that has been developed by a community of geeks web experts.  It is done through collaboration and they are constantly updating it and fixing reported bugs.  Some of the best software out there today is open source.  One example of open source software that you may already be using is the FireFox browser (if you aren’t, get it is much more secure than Internet Explorer). 

With open-source software, you will not have a customer service number to call when you have a problem.  What you will usually have is a community bulletin board with thousand of users posting their issues and helping solve other users issues.  You also won’t be paying hundreds of dollars a month to wait on hold for an hour just to get some guy in India who will tell you that he can’t help you.  You decide which is better. 

Also there are experts for type of open-source software who will be happy to work by the hour to help you with your issues.  Usually they are very helpful and work for $25-$50 per hour.

There are several open source programs out there that will allow Jenny to get her store up and running.  The other great thing is that there are hundreds or thousands of themes available for most open-source programs.  Many of them are also free and some of them may cost $5-$80.  With a little searching, Jenny should be able to find a really cute theme that is just right for baby products.  

My MezuzahStore.com was build using free software called Cre Loaded.  Cre Loaded is a version of different open-source software called OsCommerce.  The only difference is that it has a lot of really handy modifications already built in.  When I started with it in ’04, it was the coolest thing anywhere. 

In the last few months some new stuff has come out that is really a lot better.  I just discovered one that I am thinking of switching to called Magento.  There is also a new one called PrestaShop.  Both of these are open-source which means they are free!   Now that I have so much invested in Cre Loaded, I am putting off the chore of setting up a new site and porting all of my data into a new system.  I will get around to it eventually.  But for Jenny I would suggest that she starts out with one of these new ones.  She is going to have to invest some time learning whichever system she uses.  She might as well invest that time in learning how to use software that is based on the latest technology.

Installing the Software to the Server

Jenny will be able to find very detailed instructions on the software’s website telling exactly how to install it to her server.  Let me give you a short rundown of what is involved in most of them. 

Jenny will download the software from its website by clicking on the download link.  She will likely have to unzip the file.  She will now have a folder with a lot of folders and files in it.  She is going to have to get this up to her server.  Usually this will be done using FTP.  FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is just a system for moving files and folders onto and off of web servers.  If you have no idea what I am talking about, just search Google for “how to FTP” you will find plenty of tutorials.

Once Jenny has the stuff uploaded she is going to have to go into the control panel of her web hosting account and create a database.  This database is where the software will store all of the product information that she will enter into her store.  It will also store all of the information for all of the thousands of orders that she is going to get soon!

At this point she will probably have to navigate to a specific page on her new website.  This page will ask her for her database info and to create a new username and password for her admin account.  There are going to be some more little task to do after that which will be detailed in the software documentation.

The whole process that I just described would take Sean (the 17 year old kid next door) about an hour.  Jenny should put aside a Sunday for it or get Sean to come over and do it for her. 

Themes

The most fun part of the project will probably be picking a theme.  The nice thing about themes is that they don’t affect the core software so you can usually install a few and try them out to see which one you like best. 

Entering Products

Pictures

When you are selling stuff online, you are really selling a picture and a description.  Your customer is going to decide to spend $57.99 on your hand made baby carrier without ever seeing it or touching it.  The main thing the customer will use to decide is the picture. 

Try to create pictures that look sharp, clean and bright.  For almost all products you want to have a white background.  There are a lot of tricks to accomplish this.  Here are a few:

• Photograph under a bright light
• Place your item on a white background when you photograph it
• Play around with the exposure and white balance on the camera
• You may want to invest in a light tent for some products
• After you have your pictures use PhotoShop or some similar program to clean up the background and adjust the colors etc.