Selling Myself

There are times when the Internet feels like one big catalog. You can order anything and everything (and if you do not enjoy shopping in general, like me, it is a godsend). And so, with this in mind, my intern and I are discussing the concept of creating an online store. I suspect many of you have these, so any thoughts or opinions would be helpful.

From what I have disseminated from the growing list of resources, one’s success with an online store has as much to do with ecommerce software as it does the actual the products. Even knowing a little coding is nothing in the scheme of finding the ultimate shopping cart for your customer. I do not know about any of you, but I find this all a bit daunting.

I have looked at various ideas from free shopping carts and vendors who do not require much, but it gets complicated when it comes to creating an actual cyber store. I spend enough time marketing that I do not want to spend my time on complicated Internet resources. It needs to be relatively painless from my end, look professional, provide reliable service to customers and have a user-friendly back-end.

A potential solution is from Ashop Commerce. What I like about them is similar to the reason I like the idea of online storage of files – the software does not live on one computer, but is assessable by several. It means I do not have to cart stuff between the office and home, worrying about having this disk or that, it is all there, online - everything – the store, the shopping cart, the files and the back end.

Essentially, they do it all. Working with their templates (this blog for instance is a template), you upload logos and such, set up the store online, which is hosted on their servers. You can sell tangible goods, downloads, anything and it covers it all. They provide the shopping cart. The customer pays through it and you fulfill the order.

So, I like the ease of this. Anything to make life, especially the business side, a little easier.