Building the Boutique

As I mentioned the other day, I’m planning on moving my store off of yahoo and onto a better eCommerce host. I spent the last couple of days trying out my top three choices. Here are a few notes I took on each…

Volusion
I spent two days going through Volusion and getting a feel of their interface. Tanya commented on my last blog and sent me this, which talks about their problems with bandwidth, so that makes me pretty skiddish.

Plus one of the features most important to me is customization. If I can’t use my own template, I can’t be bothered. And if it’s too complicated I can’t be bothered either. Volusion says theyre customizable, and I played around with their WYSIWYG editor a bit, but the free trial doesn’t give you FTP access so I can’t test my own template out. That’s a major thumbs down right there — I’m not going to give you $150 and then realize later that I can’t use my own design! But beyond just that, volusion is very, VERY powerful. There are actually a lot of features that I don’t need, and some of it is really complicated but if you watch their training videos, you’ll get the hang of it.

Shopify
I’ve heard this place is a bit more “simple” but I don’t really need something as powerful as Volusion. I also like that they use store tags, it seems easier to customize my site than V. Their interface is definitely prettier, although it looks like CJ and Volusions’ looks like wordpress (ew). They say they use store tags but they don’t seem to be as flexible as the store tags on Yahoo! stores…which probably both good and bad. Their tag language is called liquid and they have serverside software called Vision that allows you to customize your store design. If you ask me, “Vision” is pretty pointless, and fully customizable it’s not. The give you templates that you can edit, which is a pain in the butt if your design is already done. And there are sub template pages you have to edit, about six of them, and that makes it even more annoying — imagine having to make the same changes six times. Oh, and on top of that since they’re .liquid files you can only edit them BY HAND and not with a WYSIWYG editor. Yeah, NO way. I’m sure I could have figured out their langauge but I gave up after a while. Since I’ve heard better things about corecommerce anyways, it’s not worth wasting my time.

CoreCommerce
Oh boy, I’ve heard SO many good things about their services, but after starting their free trial yesterday, I have NO idea why. First off, their user CP isn’t very attractive or well designed. And there seems to be a lot of bugs in their system. I go to add something, and it doesn’t show up. I go to edit one little piece of text, and an entire form field will dissapear. Then I tried to customize the layout. Their system for customization seems to be the easiest and the most straight forward — you can upload your design, and they’ll break it up into a header and footer for all your pages. Simple, right? Well, if it actually worked correctly, I’m sure it would be. I uploaded my design, I went back and checked the html files, and all the right coding is there. I clicked view site…NONE of my layout is showing up. There are just a bunch of boxes with logos in them. There’s no layout on any of the subpages either.

Of course, my first thought is to go to support. Oh, wait, they don’t have online chat support. To me, that right there is a major, major site. You can not run a professional business that has anything to do with webhosting without online chat support, preferably 24×7 support. So I decided to be patient and submit a ticket. I waited, and waited, eventually went to bed, woke up, still no response. Over 15 hours later, I finally received a reply from the team…and it was a non answer answer. I really don’t get how anyone can rave about their services. Sure, I’ve only been using them for 1 day but their support is HORRIBLE and that’s not excusable.

So I’m kind of back where I started. I’m not loving any of these three choices, although I’m leaning a bit towards Volusion. But the most obnoxious thing is that none of them will give me ftp access so I cant fully test out my template, which is extremely frustrating. On top of all that, I’ll have to change the urls to my pages after I’ve spent so much time and money building backlinks to the ones I already have. Ugh. I had no idea making this decision would be so complicated!

I’ve been making a lot of last minute decisions recently. Well, not really; these changes have been a long time coming but I expected to put them of for a while. First was changing the entire layout of the site, which I’ve wanted to do for quite a while. I think the store could look a lot more professional and put together, and I think it will improve sales because customers will “trust” the site more (and it’s really hard to get that trust when customers have never heard of you before).

I actually put the finishing touches on the layout today, but I had some problems installing it so I contacted Yahoo! store support about it and, well, their answers (or lack thereof) convinced me that it’s time to move to a better ecommerce solution.

Yahoo Should Probably Go Suck An Egg Or Something
Here’s what happend with Yahoo! that was essentially the final straw. I don’t use templates, I design the store myself, of course. When I first designed it 2 years ago I used a dreamweaver plugin. That plugin is only compatibable with Dreamweaver 7 (and some earlier copies) which was released in 2004. Yes, 2004, a whopping six years ago. And it’s never been updated since. It’s basically impossible to get a copy of Dreamwever 7 unless you spend $600 and buy a used one on ebay or amazon or something. When I asked support if they would ever update the program, he said “Ive only gotten 2 or 3 requests for that in the last 2-3 years”. Really?!? I’m supposed to believe that amongst all your clients who have signed up in the past few years, only “2 or 3″ of them custom design their websites using Dreamweaver? That’s hogwash if you ask me.

It seems that Yahoo! likes to make it’s customers do everything by hand. And updating a layout is just one thing it doesn’t do. It also doesn’t…
-Track inventory by options
-Automatically update category pages
-Cross out original prices when sale prices are added
-Allow you to do mass mark downs on selected products
-Have any apps or image galleries beyond just ONE photo per page
-Allow you to have more than one email account

….and yet they charge $30 more than almost all the other ecommerce services I’ve come across.

Mind you, I contacted their development team back when I first started with them, close to 2 years ago. In the past two years the only upgrade they’ve done has been allowing you to choose items to exclude from a coupon code. Yeah, that wasn’t particularly high on my list of demands.

Choosing A New eCommerce Solution

I’ve pretty much narrowed things down to three options….

CoreCommerce
Volusion
Shopify

And in that order, kinda. Shopify is one of the first that I looked at, but I’m already not loving the support. I’ve heard good things about the first two, slightly more about CoreCommerce but Volusion has all these amazing, free store apps and Ive already gotten a chance to speak with one of their reps (CC doesn’t seem to have 24 hour support). It’s going to be a really, really tough decision, but I have to make one QUICK if I have any shot of getting a refund for this month from Yahoo! And I’m not going to be happy camper if I have to spend another month with them.

I went down to LA for the day on Saturday (and just missed the bad weather, thank God!) for the Summer 2010 market. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to market, since I ordered a lot in small quantities last year via linesheets. Even if it’s a smaller market, compared to Fall or Spring, it was so nice to be at the industry trade shows again.

Transit
Our first stop was the Transit shoe show inside the California Market Center. Um, I like shoes, like most women, but the shoe show is always the most boring exhibit. There are so many vendors and they’re all selling the exact. same. thing. Same trendy strappy sandals, gladiators in every color, booties, and jeweled flats. *yawns* The only line that really stood out to me was LAMB. They have a pair of super high heeled sandals coming out that are REALLY unique looking; I can’t even explain what they look like, but you’ll know them when you see them. They’re also launching a line of leather thong sandals which are really cute, good prices too. But it looks like another boutique here in town has already snapped them up! Shoes would be great to have, but they’re such expensive inventory to carry with all the sizes and what not. Oh, and the fact that I don’t have any room for them might be a problem as well…

(more…)

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Next weekend the LA fashion district will be gearing up for the Summer 2010 market, which I couldn’t be MORE excited about. I haven’t been to market in a while, since I didn’t buy ahead of time for Spring. Actually, I’ll be doing my Spring buying while I’m up there and taking a look at what’s in store for Summer. It sounds backwards, but since I’ve changed my business model a lot, and opening my retail location here in town is one of the reasons why.

As I mentioned a few months ago, opening up in a salon was such a last minute thing. I think I spoke with the owners a month or a month and a half before everything was up and running. We opened in November and the Spring ‘09 market took place in October. I ALMOST went to it and placed orders for a whole bunch of stuff, and honestly, I’m glad that I didn’t. Because now that I’ve gotten to know the clientèle here it’s definitely changed what things I would put in the shop (mainly price wise), and of course, buying for a brick and mortar location is much different than the web.

So my new model is to sell what I have BEFORE I buy more (and I recently learned that Banana Republic does this as well), and I plan to stick with it for a while. I’ve said before that depending on immediates is risky business, and it can be, but luckily I work with some pretty flexible lines. I’m also limiting my budget by a LOT, but considering how small my space is, a little bit goes a long way. So here’s what I’m planning on carrying…

Denim – finally! I found a great premium line that retails around $100 AND they get a ton of press.
Footwear – Okay, just flip flops. But it’s a start!
Maxi’s – Once again. But they’re such HOT sellers, and they’re inexpensive, easy to ship and hardly get returned.
Tops – I’m usually more cocktail dress focused but tops will definitely be a bigger selling point in the shop.

So I plan on bringing in at least two more lines, MAYBE 3 depending on how I can stretch my dollars. And on top of that I’m looking into jewelry, but I’ll talk more about that another time

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had fun yesterday and on NYE — I did, surprisingly; I caught up on all the movies I’ve been wanting to see (Avatar truly is amazing!) and got to go out to eat with family and friends. It’s so strange to be in 2010 with a new decade in front of us. If you’re my age, then you probably changed a LOT in the past 10 years and will do the same in the upcoming 10 years. For me, the next decade is crunch time because there are so many things I want to achieve career wise. And it’s probably quite obvious what my goals are for this year (I don’t do new years resolutions); to make my brick and mortar shop successful and keep up the momentum with my online shop.

The first positive change for the new year is my signs. I posted a couple of weeks ago about the decal I had made, and how it came out too small. Well, I put it up on the wall over my space and here’s how it looks:

Hmmm. It’s a little dinky, no? If it were about double that size it would look AWESOME. Well, actually in person it looks awesome too, but just on a much smaller scale. Dali decals does good work, and in a couple of months I’ll probably order one that’s a bit bigger. But this will have to work for now.

When I was putting my other decal in the window a couple of weeks ago I realized how much space we had in the back window for a banner. So I promptly ordered one from HalfPriceBanners.com (I think? It was either them or EmpireBanners.com, not sure) and they sent me back this wonderful 4′x2′ banner:

And it only cost $18 (plus $8 shipping). Let me tell you, that’s an AWESOME deal. All the local places I checked with wanted to charge $50-$100 for something similar. Of course it was a bit of a risk ordering something from the internet when you’re not familiar with what kind of work they do, but I took the risk and it paid off in a BIG way. The banner looks so pretty in person, it looks exactly like my business cards and they even got the gradient background in there perfectly. It’s also made of a durable fabric that can be used inside or out, and they gave me free grommets as well.

Actually, ordering the banner was the easy part — hanging that thing was a pain in the rear end! Mainly because I had to search all over town to find suction hooks to hang it on and it’s fallen down about three times. Each time I’ve had to drag this giant ladder out from the back, climb up it feeling like I’m going to topple over, lift up the blinds and get covered with dirt and dust. And on top of that the suction hooks from target don’t hold very well. But it’s been up for about 3 days, which is a new records. Fingers are crossed that it sticks….literally.