An update

Thought I’d give an update since my last posting. In a nutshell, I’ve been focused on NOTtheBookStore.com and less on the violins e-commerce site. Last quarter I tried expanding to the University of Cincinnati, with a little help from their marketing club student organization. UC’s quarter ended this week, which meant a whirlwind turnaround for textbooks. And the marketing club has gathered steam and started doing their promotional fliers and other activities.

This semester will be very interesting. UC is four times bigger than Xavier, where I had previously been targeting and have been breaking even (most of the costs are for marketing). UC is a pivotal test to see if the idea scales to bigger schools. So far it’s been slow, but with Xavier it took about a year before things took off to the point of breaking even. If UC takes off, it would give me enough confidence to hire someone to revamp the site and improve the design and flow.

The violins site has taken a back seat for the last month or so. My contact with the Chinese supplier has been quiet. She’s a family friend, so I’m confident that if I took the time to contact her again she’d help me out. I did some initial work with a Shopify site, but I wish it were more of a drag and drop. Most sites I’ve worked with, the drag and drop part of it is too simple, but programming with CSS has been too difficult. Google’s Blogger so far has the easiest to work with from a layouts standpoint. There’s still a skill gap there. Another gap has been the use of Photoshop or Illustrator to design graphics. I could really use that skill so I can update the graphics on the site easier.

I’ve started reading the book “The Other 8 Hours” based off of Adam’s recommendation. It’s inspired me to continue to do a little every day, even if it’s as small as 10-15 minutes. Hopefully the time will add up and eventually I’ll get something successful! I’ve deleted all my back episodes of CSI and took it off my DVR. Hopefully this will buy me the time I need every day!

An update

The foray: Step 1

Thanks to the people in the blogosphere (does anyone use that word anymore?) for the help. I had some pretty interesting tidbits, from some offerings of wisdom to some recommendations.

@kvr said: "Besides if you don't see a way to earn back $25 a month then maybe your in the wrong business." That woke me up. 

An anonymous commenter suggested a site to check out, which I did. It talked about general things to look for in an e-commerce site host.

@Adam McFarland said: "It sounds like you have a good 'in' to get these violins at a good price from a company that not everyone has access to. That's a huge competitive advantage to start with." I hadn't thought of the connection with China as a competitive advantage. I still revert to thinking only about the product and not the business holistically. 

@nethy on Adam's blog suggested Weebly. I checked it out, it actually was pretty neat... drag and drop web designing. For a product with a high price point like violins, may not be the best. But I definitely see a use for it for future endeavors. 

What put me over the top was a post on Neville's Financial blog about how interest rates in a savings account were laughably low. I'm losing money by it sitting in a savings account that pays interest rates below inflation. So now's a good time to invest it! Neville responded to my comment and offered up a post he did about starting his e-commerce site. I actually had read it a long time ago, but I plan to do it again now that I've got $25 sunk into it. :)

So... I just signed up for Shopify. And for good measure I entered their e-commerce contest where the top selling site got $100,000. Just for fun. Thanks all for the encouragement. The first baby step is done. The next one will be to figure out how to make the site look professional. 

The foray: Step 1

A foray into e-commerce

My dad, who works a lot with China, one day asked me if I had any interests in selling violins. He had a contact who manufactured violins, and since I'm a violin player myself he figured he'd ask. I was intrigued, since I had just bought a new violin (the first since high school), and someone told me it was actually made in China. Turns out Chinese-made violins have gotten pretty good.

I got a catalog from the manufacturer, and the prices seemed low enough to get a good margin. My parents, who happened to be heading to China for a visit, bought two sample violins and lugged them on the plane back. Over the holidays, I played it and had a violin teacher friend of mine play it too. He confirmed the market price would be something where I could make a nice margin.

But how do I go about selling violins? I had no interest in setting up a retail store. So I figured starting by selling on-line was the way to go. There are lots of questions. Are people willing to buy a violin on-line? Who do I market this to? How do I set up an e-commerce site? I had an idea... why not sell Chinese made violins to Chinese people? Not to propagate stereotypes, but that's quite a large market (I myself belong to the Chinese violin playing demographic). It would be pretty easy to target advertising, and you'd think the trust factor would be there.

I was pretty pumped up about this over the holidays. I even got a fortune that said "An interesting musical opportunity is in your future." (Apparently taking pictures of fortunes with the iPhone doesn't work that well.) Recently, I figured I should take the next step... which I believe is to set up an e-commerce site. I'd ideally love to set up a cheap, if not free, site where people could click on a "buy" button. Then I could at least test the idea to see if any traffic was generated.

But this proved to be a little dauting. I asked Adam McFarland on his blog, and he suggested Shopify. I checked it out, but it was $25 a month. So I did some Google-ing, and found a tutorial on how to set up an ecommerce website with Wordpress in 5 minutes. Then I discovered the difference between Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com. I needed to host my own site in order to set up the e-commerce plug in. After way too many hours of researching hosting sites, I paid $80 or so to set up a bluehost.com site for a year.

It took me about 2-3 hours to set up the Wordpress e-commerce site (had to do a little debugging). I then had trouble customizing the site to look decent. So it was back to the drawing board.

I checked back on Adam's site and @nethy suggested I try Weebly, which allowed you to drag and drop your way to an e-commerce site for free. I tried that out, but I wasn't happy with shopping cart because it dumped me off on Paypal. I figured if someone was going to pay that kind of money for a violin, it'd hafta at least look like the cart was on my site. So back to the drawing board again.

I looked at Godaddy's e-commerce solution... $9 a month. It got bad reviews. 1and1's web hosting was $9.99 setup fee, and required a year subscription. Its reviews said it was hard to use for newbies (that's me!). Yahoo was like $30+ with a percentage of revenue too. I think my next step is going to be Shopify, Adam's original suggestion.

I keep wondering if I'm overcomplicating this process. I'm already out $80 for hosting. I'm to the point where I think I need to just suck it up and try one of these sites, thinking I'll never learn if I don't try. And now I'm wondering if this is even a good idea. Any advice from the experienced crowd out there?

A foray into e-commerce