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title: Marlow e-commerce choices

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title: Marlow e-commerce choices
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# Marlow e-commerce choices
The idea is to set up an online store to help selling the remaining inventory of https://www.instagram.com/house_of_heer. Nowadays the process is all done manually over instagram, an operation that takes time and doesn't scale. 

This is an huge topic with several branches, but we'll focus on the most essential ones to get it up and running with the lowest cost possible. Enhancements can always be done in the future if necessary, the most important thing is to put it online first. 


## Platforms
There are several e-commerce platforms out there, but for the needs your spouse has, we can focus on the following three:

1. [Shopify](https://shopify.ca/online)
2. [Wix](https://www.wix.com/ecommerce/website)
3. [Squarespace](https://www.squarespace.com/ecommerce-website)
4. [Big Cartel](https://www.bigcartel.com/)
    *5. May be worth takig a closer look*

Initially I intended to create a in-depth overview of each one with pros and cons and then suggest one of them, but I'm not sure how much useful that would be. If you want to take a closer look at them and discuss further we can totally do it. 

For now, I suggest you to go with Shopify. It's not perfect but none of them are, and at least I'll be able to help you much more than if it was any of the other ones. There are certainly things that pisses me off on Shopify, but maybe those are not going to be a problem for you. 

Please let me know if thig makes sense, I'll be happy to dig more on the details if you feel like to. 

### Setting up
I can help you with setup, configuration and whatever else you may need help with, especially on the more technical aspects of thing. Just let me know. (and btw, this goes without saying, I'm helping out a friend here).

## Basic operations
1. Maintain inventory
2. Make sells and receive payouts
3. Shipping
4. Marketing
5. Edit the layout to your liking
6. E-mail support / contact forms

### 1. Maintain inventory
This is by far the most daunting operation, especially in the beginning when you have to write every single product name, description, variants and photos. Although there are some ways to automate it, the automatization preparation itself requires a lot of effort and only makes sense when you have several hundreds of products and variants. 

It's a boring task, but once done you'll rarely need to ever touch it again. The e-commerce platform will take care of adjusting inventory quantities and remove from the website's listing (or keep it listed but show as out of stock if you prefer). 

### 2. Make sells and receive payouts
What would be of commerce without this, right?! :smile:. The no-brainer approach is to accept credit cards using the built-in payment processor that the platform provides since it's already integrated and requires little effort and configuration to start using. You also don't need to deal with the payment companies. Although accepting e-transfers may be an option, it just adds a layer of overhead on the day to day operation, so stick to credit cards. 

### 3. Shipping
This should not present any surprises. You make a sale, confirm that's paid, and shp to the customer. Push a few buttons to update the order status and that's it. There's some setup requires to properly configure the shipping rates and frankly I personnaly have some rants about the process, but with some attention and triple checks everything should be good. 

### 4. Marketing
Marketing can be a whole book and there's plenty of people of there selling services that promisse a lot of things that are much harder to to in practice than they make appear. 

Online ads are a dumpster fire for money - requires lot of it, takes time to even start understaning if the approach is right or not, and will for sure eat all of your budget and profits. 

The thing is, you can have a great product or service, but if people don't know it exists, then it's all for nothing. But making it work by throwing money at ads is really dangerous and time consuming, so I suggest caution. 

I personally don't have much advice to give on this topic, at least not how to make it work. I know plenty of things that *don't work* though. I'd say that you should first get the site up and running, be happy with it and start sending some messages to friends and acquaintances, maybe mention it here and there and start collecting feedback. Sometimes these simple things make a lot of impact. 

### 5. Edit the layout to your liking
All platforms provide great themes (many of them free) and good editors for you to customize the layout without requiring any coding - all drag and drop. I'd say to pick a pre-built theme that you like and customize the very essentials - i.e, avoid the fixation of trying to make it "perfect", that's never going to happen. Make it good enough and release it, improvements can be made later on in smaller steps. 

- [Shopify themes](https://themes.shopify.com/themes)
- [Squarespace themes](https://www.squarespace.com/templates)
- [Wix themes](https://www.wix.com/website/templates/html/online-store)

_I'd say that you hardly would/should choose one platform over the other just because of a theme._

### 6. E-mail support / contact forms
It's a good thing to provide a contact / support form on the website so that customers can contact you with whatever questions they have. There's no need to incude an in-page support chat system, email works just fine. Any email account works as well, although having a @yourbusinessname is way more professional. 

Google has [Gmail for Business](https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/) which costs ~$7/month. There's also [Zoho Mail](https://www.zoho.com/mail/) for as little as $1.25/month, which can be a good option if you don't have a strong preference for gmail. 

## Business name vs Domain name
One thing is the the name you choose for the business, and another is the domain name (URL) for it. It's not uncommon for the domain name you want not to be available anymore, so some creativity may be necessary. 

There are companies that provide domain name registration, even Shopify can do that as well. You can use ther websites to check if the name you want is available. Good good option is https://namecheap.com, just type it there and it will show the status and possible alternatives. 

Nowadays the domain name isn't that important as it used to be several years ago, since search engines are pretty smart and many customers arrive by other platforms and / or ads, so don't stress too much on this. 

I.e, [HouseOfHeer.com](https://houseofheer.com) is an existing business - which, by the way, looks like a very good reference. 
