Setting Up Shop: A Checklist for New E-tailers

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Setting Up Shop: A Checklist for New E-tailers
By Jennifer Schiff
March 20, 2008

A Tale of Two E-tailers: Shoebacca.com and SohoLighting.com
After years of selling gently used shoes online via eBay, and building up a loyal customer base, the folks behind Shoebacca.com, an e-commerce business with "a serious shoe problem," decided to open a freestanding site to sell new athletic footwear (while maintaining their eBay presence to sell used shoes).

While eBay "does a fantastic job of letting you market and sell something that isn't new," said Angie Grimes, Shoebacca's director of e-commerce, she and the Shoebacca.com team felt their new strategy and product line called for a new, freestanding online store.

So they put together a comprehensive wish list of the features and capabilities for the new site and went in search of an e-commerce solution.

After checking out some different options, Shoebacca.com went with Magento. This e-commerce solution offers customizability, secure one-page checkout, and site management, marketing and promotions, shipping, payment, order management, customer service, customer and catalog management, browsing, and analytics and reporting tools all in one place. (To create the new site's look and feel the company hired a designer.)

After running the site in beta (always a good idea), and sending out a press release to announce the new site (another good idea), Shoebacca.com went live on March 1.

While startling life as a Yahoo! Merchant Solution or an eBay Store may be right for some e-commerce business owners, for SohoLighting.com president Zev Herman, they were not an option. "I was building my own business, not theirs," he stated. And he felt he couldn't achieve the professional look and feel he wanted for SohoLighting.com renting a cyberstore. So he purchased a domain name and went in search of an e-commerce solution that fit his specifications.

"I knew that I needed something that was comprehensive… that could be flexible in the way it handled my product data and the information that I wanted to display on the site," said Herman. "I needed to be able to display inventory. I needed to have customer reviews on the site. And I wanted to be able to do mass updates at one time, so if the price goes up on a lot of products, I wouldn't have to go into each one and make a change."

Other items on Herman's list: easy ordering and order processing and inventory management — and easy to update. ("I'm technology proficient, but I'm not a programmer," he explained.) He also wanted to be able to customize the look and feel of the site (for which he hired a designer).

After checking out five different options, Herman went with Volusion, an all-in-one e-commerce solution that recently won the Small Business Computing Excellence in Technology Award for Best Storefront.

Four years after going live, SohoLighting.com is a thriving e-commerce business, and Herman is very happy with the decisions he made. And, we hope after reading this story, you will be, too.

Jennifer Lonoff Schiff is a regular contributor to Ecommerce-Guide.com and runs a blog for and about small businesses.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!

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