Ecommerce

Part five of my six part series My quest for extra income will be covering our ecommerce endeavor. Since we run a sign business, we decided on trying to sell tshirts online.

Follow up:

We sat down and came up with a plan. This go around with a business model, we decided to try and sell tshirts online. We approached both of our parents and let them get in on the deal. This would be a very low investment, with a hopefully high rate of return, or so we thought.

We had been watching other tshirt sites explode with orders and wanted in on the take. We decided on a website name and got hosting for it. Since I'm not here to advertise the site, I'll be bypassing the website name and just letting you know about the ins and outs of the venture briefly.

So, we have the website and I'll be doing the design. I decide on using Zen Cart. It's a free shopping cart program that seemed fairly easy for me to configure. After a few days of setup, I had about 30 shirt designs up for devouring by the masses, right? Wrong! I had 30 shirt designs and I started working on search site submissions, still worked on the layout of the page, figuring bits and pieces out with Zen Cart, etc. etc. It wasn't a fun process at times, but fulfilling when the final result was up and running. I've since increased the shirt designs to well over 100 and am adding more as I can make time to do so.

At this point, you're thinking: Wow, over 100 designs, that must make at least a little money, right? Again, you are wrong. I had gotten a $50 free Adwords code and went and set that up with Google. Got through all the ad setup and watched the hits from google start to trickle in. Still not a sale. I went through and did another test buy on the site and everything worked flawlessly. I was going through everything that I could think of: cart not showing correctly, functioning correctly, etc. Everything I tried worked. I finally came to the realization that the site was new and hits will take time. I don't have a huge budget for Adwords and building a network for links doesn't happen overnight.

When we started the site, I was getting between 50 to 100 hits a day. That has now doubled but still no sales. The pricing is competitive, but I know the shirt color selection is lacking. I can't do much about that right now as funds won't let us buy hundreds of different styles and colors. We are making do with what we have and hoping for the best. I've learned through my time on the internet that patience is needed. I know there are people out there that will want what we offer, and we are doing our best to get those people pushed to the site.

Going through lots and lots of tshirt forums, I've read about people trying what we are doing and failing, but those that have succeeded were the ones that stuck with it and kept adding content. In this case, content means designs. We'll get there, but it's a slow process. The average for most people being 8 to 12 months to see any sort of return seems too damned far off to me, but I am determined to stick with the site.

It's been a learning experience but I have gotten a lot of information and how-to knowledge from it all. I'm just hoping there's a freak accident and the only thing that will fix it are tshirts from my site.