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Ecommerce

Building an E-commerce website:

E-commerce websites can be challenging, there are only two e-commerce systems in the industry that are worth taking a look at for small tomedium business, Shopify & Woocommerce.

Shopify is its own system, allowing people to pay for a e-commerce website and manage it themselves, a popular option for smallerstores.

Woocommerce is an engine for building woocommerce websites, I use it as a framework when building websites, many of the stores Ihave built have been very successful on that framework. A couple of my clients had their sites and products featured on dragons den andhave driven sales amounting to $20,000 /monthly with no issue.

Online Store Planning

In my experience, there are a couple of points to be aware of when building online stores, first it's to learn that E-commerce stores all really havea similar design and framework and the closer we stay to that the more successful it will be (clients coming to the site will already know how touse it).  E-commerce sites from a design perspective are simple; product categories on the left, products on the right. I have attached ascreenshots below;

Product EntryHere is an example of understanding product entry and how e-commerce sites can manage product and inventory.Example: A simple method of inputting products would be adding 9 products for small, medium, large t-shirts, that come in three different colours,blue, red, white. Example 2: An advanced educated method of inputting products would be 1 product with 2 attributes and  resulting in 9 variationssize colour

small blue t-shirtsmall red t-shirtsmall white t-shirtMedium blue t-shirt

5. etc....That way you set up one product and it can actually be 9 different products because of the variations, I have seen people do this backwards, andthen when it comes to managing their inventory they can't keep track of anything, and the stores fail.

Shipping

Another challenging topic is shipping, there are "plugins" that integrate to your website and automatically calculate shipping on weight &dimensions and distance (UPS, CANADA POST and FEDEX). However it can be a lot of data entry and management, I don't recommend usingthat option in beginning. Your best to flat rate your shipping when you start, and figure out some box sizes.

Photography

Take Good Photos! Depending on how many products your selling and how often they change, you may want to outsource this or setup a smalllittle studio yourself. Amazon has a great option many small online store owners use, https://www.amazon.com/MyStudio-Professional-Lightbox-Lighting-Photography/dp/B0015450T6for $300 dollar investment, with a $500 dollar good camera it's sometimes easier to it yourself.Hopefully this helps give you good baseline of information :)Mathew