Sheesh! Opening an online store is WORK!
OK – so now I know what the owner of a new store feels like on the first day of business – hopeful, anxious, exhausted … and thinking that maybe 8-5 isn’t so bad after all.
Terror aside, we have “opened the doors” of the Karen’s Absurd Art online store with two – count ‘em – two T-shirts that will appeal to beekeepers, as well as people who appreciate beekeepers or just like bees. You can read about the process of designing these shirts here.
The design was actually the easy part – I enjoy drawing absurd views of bees and insects. What I didn’t enjoy was weeks of helping to figure out how to take pictures, pricing, packaging, shipping, and other details. But, we are now ready to sell these puppies to the public!
I feel like I should be standing on a cliff offering the T-shirts to the e-commerce gods, Lion King-style. But I live in a rural area with no hills – and no bridges to jump from if this venture fails.
Our first really big decision was what selling & distribution methods we should use. These ranged from an e-commerce word press plug-in to sell directly from the website using Square to processing sales & shipping products ourselves; or using an established system like Amazon Distribution; or selling in local gift stores; or maybe just getting a booth at every local festival.
The winner? Amazon! You can see what our product setup looks like here or as below.
If I had not had help, I would only be selling these shirts locally, rather than online, because setting up an online store is a lot of work for one person. I COULD do it, but it would be slow, and it would be ugly. I just have too many other irons in the fire.
I’m fortunate that my son, BJ, and his colleague, Soo, are familiar with details of the e-commerce world (and willing to research the rest) through their company, Moyars Consulting, LLC., and they stepped in to round out the team. Soo, in particular, has done most of the work getting the karensabsurdart.com website up and figuring out Amazon Distribution.
We decided to use Amazon as it eliminates the need to purchase shipping boxes, tape, etc., and to always be on call to ship orders. Plus, they take care of returns and collecting taxes, so my belief is that the fees they charge balance the cost of mailing my products to them and the time needed for us to handle distribution details. We may decide later to also sell unique or limited-run products directly, using Square to collect payment, but that’s another day.
To get the whole process started, we first selected a word press theme for the website. I had decided I wanted to keep it simple: a Gallery for samples of my drawings (for my ego and maybe poster sales later); a Store to sell products (so I can buy food & more books); and a Blog (to hopefully draw attention to the website so I can sell products and buy food & more books).
That’s it – short & sweet.
We purchased a nice looking theme, only to discover that we couldn’t use it until we also purchased a second software (a “key”) – it was like buying a pair of high tops, but you have to pay another fee to get the laces to keep them from flopping off your feet. This annoyed me. I insisted on a refund, which the company did give me. They actually had offered to give me the “key” software free after I complained, but I rebelled.
It’s the principal of the thing, right? If you are going to sell online, you need to be upfront with a warning that says, “STOP! You can’t use this unless you give us more money!”
So, Soo and I went back online and found a free theme called Kale, that we are very happy with it. It’s clean, simple, easy to use, and no surprises.
Then we (well, Soo really), spent another month placing the logos, pictures, text, etc., that I supplied for the home page, bio info, gallery, etc., etc. …
The text part is easy for me. After 35 years in journalism (many of those with an editor breathing down my neck and yelling in my ear), I can whip out a pretty coherent blurb extremely fast. Give me a few more minutes to edit, and we’re good to go.
Pictures are another issue. When I worked for the local daily paper, I once was a roving regional reporter and was regularly thrown out of the office to “go find a story.” They also insisted I take a camera with me to document the person or place I was reporting on.
Sadly, the photo end of the job was not my forté – F-stops? Shutter speed? What??
The “real” photographers (who were busy with local stories) were nice about my efforts but I know they cringed when they saw a camera in my hand. One day, after the chief photographer developed my film (you remember film, right?), he held the proof sheet of fuzzy pictures in front of my face and sputtered at me, “Do you even look when you take these?” I said “Why, yes I do – I take off my glasses so I can get my eye close to the viewer thingy, and then I take the picture.” Apparently, when you are nearsighted, this is not a recommended method.
Soo, who fortunately wears contacts, has spent quite a lot of time taking different shots of the T-shirts, both on a model and on a table. There are inevitably a few wrinkles that defy smoothing on some of the table shots, and shooting the white shirt on a white background was a nightmare (Amazon requires a white background), as the shirt then disappears. Sigh …
But, once we had acceptable pictures, Soo followed the instructions to start selling the shirts through Amazon Distribution to make sure all product info is clear and readable. Fortunately, their instructions are clear and readable.
One of the more time-consuming tasks was pulling together descriptions for the products, but again, Amazon gives you a guide that is pretty helpful on creating 1.) key features text, and 2.) product descriptions. Key features are things like fabric, washing instructions, color, etc. Product descriptions are written in your voice explaining the products.
From what we’ve researched, it is important to follow all the instructions to the best of your ability – it will help you get into a routine, plus Amazon won’t bounce your stuff back.
I’m obviously giving you a summary of the distribution operation. There was certainly pain involved in all of this, but I guess it was in a fun way … like burning your fingers on a gooey marshmallow roasted over a campfire, which you pop in your mouth and also burn your tongue.
But finally the store is open! I’ve already got two more T-shirts ready to post in the store, with a couple more in the wings. The two new shirts are the same, except that one shirt is geared to men and one to women.
So, check out “Apis Mellifera: A Real Man’s Pet” and “Apis Mellifera: A Real Woman’s Pet” in our store today!
I guarantee that if you wear these shirts you’ll get comments in public – or notice people reaching for their phones to Google the meaning of Apis Mellifera (species name for honeybees) – and then they get the joke. And, hey, you don’t have to be a beekeeper to wear this shirt!
What’s next? I know I haven’t spoken much about the details of online marketing – you’ve heard of SEO, I’m sure – so as we slog through that quagmire I’ll report on the process. Marketing can be a huge operation – there are dozens of books and gobs of online posts to guide you. But we have lives, so we won’t be doing that much research.
For our purposes, we are narrowing in on just what we think we need right now to get sales started, and we’ll then adjust as we go. Otherwise we could become mired down in the insanity.
As we are all a bit insane already, we might go down without much of a fight. I’ll keep you posted on how this goes.