Thread: Combining B&M with E-Commerce

Fellow Fastlaners, I come to you for advice.

As you may know, I own a small retail store which my wife runs while I slave away at my day job. In order to speed up my business' growth and quit my job sooner, I'm looking to expand to e-commerce.

Issue: I paid about $1,000 on Elance to get my website built and it is hosting on the Site Builder Avenue platform. I didn't realize that this was going to be the case at the time, and now regret it because Site Builder doesn't seem to be a particularly great or well-known platform, although it does to e-commerce for $50/month and seems to have all the basic necessities. On one hand, I hate to pay to have the site moved to a different platform, but on the other hand I hate to use a platform that doesn't give me the best chance of success/least headaches.

Should I switch Platforms? If so, to who?

Once I decide on the Platform, the next step will be to get products listed. This seems pretty straightforward... I plan to use manufacturer pictures whenever possible, but if not possible I'll likely need a small photo tent and nice camera lens to take the photos myself. Once I have the pictures, I just come up with product descriptions above and beyond what the manufacturer says about it.

I have a lot of different product categories though, and am not sure if I want to list them all. In particular, we sell costume jewelry which changes constantly and this seems like it would be a bigger headache than bigger, more continuous items.

Should I include costume jewelry on the website? Am I missing anything in the process of adding items?

Once products are listed, I need a system to actually get the products out. I use Quickbooks POS currently (looking to change this year though), and it seems I will have to manually update the website with quantities, then manually update the POS system with sales, both of which seem like a pain in the @$$. Then I will need someone to actually box the orders up and ship them out. On top of that, 90% of my merchandise is on the sales floor, which seems like it could be a problem with limited quantity items.

What works for combining B&M and E-commerce? Do I need seperate inventory for each?

Once I have the website ready and a system to ship the products, I just need one thing - CUSTOMERS! That means I'll need more people to find my website, which will require SEO, PPC, etc - I'll come back to guys later on that.

Originally Posted by cashflow3000

Hey cparsons -

With your talk of Platforms I'm not sure what you need exactly, but the following might help you.

1. make sure you own and register your own domain name. Go Daddy is a good choice for registrar

2. make sure you own your own web hosting. Host Gator is a good choice here but there are many others

If your web host gives you cPanel access with Fantastico you will have several easy to configure options for an online store.

I own my domain and have my webhosting with Site Builder Avenue. It has all the basic requirements for e-commerce, but I'm considering going with something like Shopify.com...

Originally Posted by cashflow3000

From the sounds of it, you may want to try starting with a few products first. If you have 20x or 30x of something in stock, and you generally keep it in stock, go ahead and list it. If you have 1x or 2x of something in stock, and once its gone its gone, why bother.

Selling stuff online is a whole different process from running a retail store front.

Basically, to be successful it will require a 2nd business.

Have fun, and good luck!

Yes, I am leaning towards it essentially being a 2nd business as well. We have about 5 categories of products that we sell in our store, and I plan to just start with our best items from 2 of our categories that don't change a whole lot and we tend to keep plenty in stock.

Originally Posted by biophase

Try out Bigcommerce, much more features than Shopify.

Thanks Biophase - good suggestion. Any other advice?

We are doing this currently with a chocolate shop. We hired a guy through craigslist instead of elance b/c locally there are many different folks offering these services and i was able to actually meet them and qualify them.

Much cheaper and he did all the manual stuff. We actually are using Wordpress with a premium template and so far it has a very easy to use format. Bigcommerce is a good one as well.

As for marketing it i would recommend learning this side yourself. Even folks like Dan Kennedy state that every business owner should have their hands wrapped around the marketing side of the business.

As far as the process that is something we are working on as well in terms of orders coming in and prepping them to ship.

Joe

I highly suggest you stay away from those automatic builder websites and create your own or have someone create it for you. Hostgator is a great company to host and buy domains. I could possibly create it for you if you'd like.

Originally Posted by hlopez22

I highly suggest you stay away from those automatic builder websites and create your own or have someone create it for you. Hostgator is a great company to host and buy domains. I could possibly create it for you if you'd like.

Why stay away from automatic builder websites?

Anybody else with experience in this area???

There's a book I have been reading that addresses your problem pretty well.

The Art of Digital Branding by Ian Cocoran. I was reading it on the way from Toronto on the bus. Pretty genius book; I like it because you need no knowledge of marketing to understand the concepts he talks about in the book.

Originally Posted by The-J

There's a book I have been reading that addresses your problem pretty well.

The Art of Digital Branding by Ian Cocoran. I was reading it on the way from Toronto on the bus. Pretty genius book; I like it because you need no knowledge of marketing to understand the concepts he talks about in the book.

Thanks J! It's on it's way to my house now... Speed+++

So I'm still researching this, but I've decided that I will (eventually but not necessarily right away) need to move to a different e-commerce platform. The best 2 that I've found are Shopify and BigCommerce.

In case anyone else is wondering, here's a good break-down comparing the two: BigCommerce vs Shopify - Andrew Bleakley

From what I can tell, Shopify is much simpler and easier to get going, but BigCommerce has more capability. That means BigCommerce is likely the long-term choice, while Shopify would be a "starting out" choice... Since I'm already on a "starting out" platform, I see no reason to switch to Shopify. EXCEPT Shopify has several Apps/tools that make integrating with a brick and mortar store easier, which complicates the matter for me.

EDIT: I see BigCommerce has an App ($20/mo) to integrate with Quickbooks...

I also hear that in order to print shipping labels with BigCommerce you need a $40/month add-on called Ordoro... which seems like it could be a headache. Of course, that's probably not as bad as the 2% fee that Shopify charges.

Thanks biophase for the hint! I take it you have experience with BigCommerce - any suggestions?