Ecomm Challenge Day 6 — Planning & Tech Approach

Photo by Ilya Pavlov

Although I am not a developer by any stretch of the imagine, this is a task that I have been looking forward. I always loved everything tech and enjoy discovering how the internet has been built. I should have really got some of my more technical friends involved in this part of the challenge, but the reality is that I haven’t had the luxury of time to involve people as much as I would have liked to. I’m sure their advice would have been invaluable, but the reality is between working, writing these articles and actually undertaking what I need to do, I haven’t had a lot of time spare.

I keep reminding myself that it is only 15 days of commitment, but even so I feel that maybe I have set myself an unachievable task.

Anyway, enough about me, more about what I’m doing.

From the start I have always seen this challenge as two dichotomies when it comes to tech. My initial reaction was just to create a larger content site and rely on affiliate revenues, but the more I have got into the challenge I have realised that I definitely do need to make direct sales to qualify as an E-Commerce site in my own mind. Not that I am ditching the affiliate model altogether, I’m just aware that I’m never going to build a scaled site and make £100 of revenue from it in 15 days. Unlikely, at best. Equally, I think it is unrealistic to set up the full distribution chain for one product, let alone a whole category in the same amount of time.

This leaves me with some affiliate as supplementary income and drop-shipping as the alternative to buying in my own product. For those of you unfamiliar with drop-shipping this is Wikipedia’s definition:

Drop shipping is a supply chain management method in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock but instead transfers customer orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer, another retailer, or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. As in retail businesses, the majority of retailers make their profit on the difference between the wholesale and retail price, but some retailers earn an agreed percentage of the sales in commission, paid by the wholesaler to the retailer. — Wikipedia

The second dichotomy, is which platform to choose. Although know Wordpress well, I was very close to setting up a Shopify site.

Why?

Shopify seems like a great plugin and play platform for a niche e-commerce site to get up and running quickly. There are many benefits from going down the Shopify route:

Speed & Security — Speed is paramount these days for any site, but particularly so for E-Commerce that extra 1/2 second on checkout could cost you big over the course of a year. Secondly PCI compliance and the new GDPR regulations coming into force next year mean layers and layers of security to be able to trade in a compliant way and Shopify takes care of all that for you.

Customer Support — Shopify are renowned for having great support, particularly if you are less confident technically this is probably the safest route to go.

Built in Marketing & Design — Out of the box Shopify comes with basic SEO and marketing tools for free. You can build custom landing pages for different campaigns and you don’t need to worry about the technicalities of making sure your site is optimised for search. Design wise, there are many free themes that are specifically tailored for E-Commerce unlike other platforms.

Add Ons — Shopify is now a very rich ecosystem with top development teams writing add ons to do pretty much anything on the platform. To add functionality to your site you just need to search, pay, download and install to be able to stay current and be unique.

If it is so good why did I choose Wordpress?

A lot of my decision was based on familiarity. Given the nature of the challenge I don’t have the time to be figuring out a new CMS, UI and way of working. Over and above my laziness, this was my rationale:

1. Price — Pure and simple. Although Shopify offer a free 14-day trial, which would cover my challenge period. However once that period is over you pay on a subscription model. If I were to continue the challenge it might take me some time to breakeven, even with my plans for marketing the site:

2. Content Marketing — As I wanted a platform that was just as much a content platform as an E-commerce site I felt more comfortable using Wordpress. It is true that you can have a Shopify instance within Wordpress, I wasn’t willing to put in the time on a chance that it might work to my satisfaction.

3. Customisation-Again related to my plans for content and marketing I felt confident that I could find free plugins that would satisfy my short term needs. As the final site will hopefully be part affiliate and part e-commerce I was fairly confident that I could hack my way to a usable site.

4. WooCommerce — This platform has come on leaps and bounds since I last looked at it. I like the fact that it integrates so deeply with Wordpress, yet allows you the freedom to change anything that doesn’t directly relate to transaction. Many WP themes come with Woo shops these days. I’d rather just pay for the service on a transactional basis rather than a monthly subscription and manage my own hosting and speed optimisation. I will need to get an SSL at some point, so tech friends drop me a line

5. Lock in-Although you can port a site that initially was set up on Shopify, I don’t know many people who have done it successfully. It may have improved, but to my knowledge all you can export is a csv of your products and you are left to go figure.

As I said before, if you are less technical, want something easy to manage and don’t want to dig under the hood too much, then Shopify could well be the perfect solution. But for me on this occasion, on this project I’m going to go with Wordpress.

Planning

Now that I have resolved these questions, I am now in a position to choose a domain, start planning the build of the site and the essentials that it will need to get my content plan and marketing underway. Here’s my current site to do list in no particular order:

• Choose a domain
• Wordpress Theme (free ideally)
• Install themeCustomise hack time
• Add GA tracking
• Install woocommerce
• Add FB Pixel
• Add JS Sitemap
• Chrome Push Notifications
• Set up Skimlinks
• Set up Amazon Affiliates
• Free hotjar acc??
• Seo Tools
• Set up GA audiences
• Payment gateways?
• GA Event analytics
• Speed optimisation
• SSL Certificates ?
• Research final products
• Collate product content
• Upload products and descriptions
• Treat images
• Test & Launch

And that’s just the site to do list excluding content curation and production, marketing and general outreach to dos.

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