So currently I own 3 .coms. One is for my store's website. One is the Local Fish Forum. The last one is a forum dedicated to a subsection of fish.
The new one I'm launching will be an ecommerce site. The goal is to be able to sell goods online with impunity to the retail store. This allows me to run different prices if I want. Also separate the inventory. This will require another location as the goods I plan to sell won't be integrated inventory.
This will basically be a diary of how hard it is to gain traction with a new .com. Luckily I'm not selling electronics or something with a ton of competition. I plan to only sell live aquarium plants. Perhaps a few accessories that will fit with shipping. The temptation is big to offer it all online. But as I found in the past it becomes a shipping nightmare. Shipping systems quoting systems can't handle separate categories well. Say if you wanted a plant, a fish, a bottle of fertilizer and an aquarium heater. Realistically this takes 3 separate boxes/shipments. The goal will be focusing on plants, and things that won't crush plants during shipping. Like root tabs, plant weights etc. A bottle of fertilizer would crush the plants on the way there.
When I had my store selling all items online. We got a decent amount of orders without trying. I feel like my prices were clearly higher than the competition out there, but the competition was out of stock a lot.
I intend to use the buying power of my retail store to put me on par with my bigger competition and put me above the lower competition. Currently I think everyone can get about the same price. The only leg up is quantity. The more quantity you can move at once, the shipping makes more sense. Via airport it basically costs $60 to ship 1 plant. If you ship 1000 plants it costs $70.
I plan to only offer the plants that I can keep in stock at nearly a 100% up time. All the competitor sites are littered with out of stock items. I also plan to target customer groups that are very large but not targeted specially at all. Currently all aquatic plant vendors target people interested in planted aquariums. In general I find that there are sub groups. One being someone with say a betta bowl. They don't have very good lighting, likely will be cheap etc. That being said they want to provide for their pet. Also Goldfish owners want to keep some hardier live plants and also purchase plants for the goldfish to eat. This is a secondary market. You've also got african cichlid people. Which tends to be a huge market in the midwest. However most people don't realize there are plants that go great in that environment.
I don't intend on giving this website a social presence in the normal sense. No facebook, no youtube videos etc. The goal is to be a well oiled machine. Keep plants in stock and sell plants. Have cut and dry policies on shipping and dead on arrivals etc. In fact I plan to ship out only on Tuesdays no exceptions. This will allow me to only have to schedule either 1 pickup or 1 delivery to the post office a week. Also it should be easier to plan around the store's schedule. Also Plants tend to ship in on Monday from the main supplier ordered the week previously
The platform I'm going to choose to use is shopify. This is familiar because it is what I used to run the old ecommerce website. And while it's not the cheapest especially for some of the advanced options, it is easy to modify products and manage overall.
There will be many things to tweak, and decisions to be made yet. I am interested to see how the general public reacts. The average internet user is not internet savy in the slightest. So much so that I'll be using left hand navigation menu on my site. So many calls from the old site on how to navigate it with top navigation. People forget that the elderly/non internet savvy people still exist and buy things online. In many cases they are the best customers because they have a hard time comparison shopping.
The new one I'm launching will be an ecommerce site. The goal is to be able to sell goods online with impunity to the retail store. This allows me to run different prices if I want. Also separate the inventory. This will require another location as the goods I plan to sell won't be integrated inventory.
This will basically be a diary of how hard it is to gain traction with a new .com. Luckily I'm not selling electronics or something with a ton of competition. I plan to only sell live aquarium plants. Perhaps a few accessories that will fit with shipping. The temptation is big to offer it all online. But as I found in the past it becomes a shipping nightmare. Shipping systems quoting systems can't handle separate categories well. Say if you wanted a plant, a fish, a bottle of fertilizer and an aquarium heater. Realistically this takes 3 separate boxes/shipments. The goal will be focusing on plants, and things that won't crush plants during shipping. Like root tabs, plant weights etc. A bottle of fertilizer would crush the plants on the way there.
When I had my store selling all items online. We got a decent amount of orders without trying. I feel like my prices were clearly higher than the competition out there, but the competition was out of stock a lot.
I intend to use the buying power of my retail store to put me on par with my bigger competition and put me above the lower competition. Currently I think everyone can get about the same price. The only leg up is quantity. The more quantity you can move at once, the shipping makes more sense. Via airport it basically costs $60 to ship 1 plant. If you ship 1000 plants it costs $70.
I plan to only offer the plants that I can keep in stock at nearly a 100% up time. All the competitor sites are littered with out of stock items. I also plan to target customer groups that are very large but not targeted specially at all. Currently all aquatic plant vendors target people interested in planted aquariums. In general I find that there are sub groups. One being someone with say a betta bowl. They don't have very good lighting, likely will be cheap etc. That being said they want to provide for their pet. Also Goldfish owners want to keep some hardier live plants and also purchase plants for the goldfish to eat. This is a secondary market. You've also got african cichlid people. Which tends to be a huge market in the midwest. However most people don't realize there are plants that go great in that environment.
I don't intend on giving this website a social presence in the normal sense. No facebook, no youtube videos etc. The goal is to be a well oiled machine. Keep plants in stock and sell plants. Have cut and dry policies on shipping and dead on arrivals etc. In fact I plan to ship out only on Tuesdays no exceptions. This will allow me to only have to schedule either 1 pickup or 1 delivery to the post office a week. Also it should be easier to plan around the store's schedule. Also Plants tend to ship in on Monday from the main supplier ordered the week previously
The platform I'm going to choose to use is shopify. This is familiar because it is what I used to run the old ecommerce website. And while it's not the cheapest especially for some of the advanced options, it is easy to modify products and manage overall.
There will be many things to tweak, and decisions to be made yet. I am interested to see how the general public reacts. The average internet user is not internet savy in the slightest. So much so that I'll be using left hand navigation menu on my site. So many calls from the old site on how to navigate it with top navigation. People forget that the elderly/non internet savvy people still exist and buy things online. In many cases they are the best customers because they have a hard time comparison shopping.
