Tech Issues: Website

Obviously, technology plays a big part in starting an online business. This will be the first in a series of posts about the technology I’m using for my online business. I’m a software developer by trade and sometimes want to “geek out” a bit on this blog. That said, I want this blog to be useful to a wide an audience and will make every effort to keep these posts intelligible to the masses.

Step One: You Need A Website

You need a website to have an online business. I’ll cover a lot of topics in this series, but none so fundamental as the website. I started working on the website for my business before I had chosen a domain name, setup company e-mail, or determined a payment solution. Given that I have a background in software development, I had to decide whether I wanted to try and build my website “from scratch” or try to find an off-the-shelf solution. It may surprise you to hear that I really only considered the “from scratch” option for about 30 seconds before deciding against it.

I’m Not The IT Guy

I’m a software developer with plenty of web development experience and could certainly have rolled up my sleeves and started coding an e-commerce website for myself. There are even a number of existing software libraries I could have used to making things easier. I could have built and tested the entire website on my computer at home and then found a company that would rent me space on of their servers to make the site available to the masses. So why didn’t I do this? I’m not the IT guy. I love my job as a software developer and feel really fortunate to be able to make a living doing something that I enjoy, but I didn’t start this business to build a website. I started this business to develop a product and a marketing strategy to generate profits. Rather than building my site from scratch, I wanted a platform that would give me the basic elements of an e-commerce site right “out of the box”.

 

 

A Solid Core

I ultimately opted to go with an e-commerce platform called Shopify. I had heard a lot of good things about the service and signed up for their 30 day free trial. Within a few hours of playing around with my account I was convinced that this was the way to go. In my opinion there are a few key things that an e-commerce site absolutely needs:

• A clean layout with search-engine friendly elements.
• A database for easily creating, managing, and organizing your store’s products.
• A shopping cart that will remember the items a customer had even if they close the browser and return to the store several days later.
• Integration with a payment gateway so that you can accept payments from your customers electronically.

With Shopify, all of these elements are baked right in to the product. I don’t intend for this post to become an advertisement for Shopify (and I can assure you I’m not being compensated by them in any way), but I definitely strongly recommend them as an e-commerce provider. I could go on and on about all of the useful features they offer, but it all can be summed in pretty easily: They take care of the mundane details of running a website and let you focus on developing and marketing your products.

But What If I Want My Site To…

I feel confident saying that anyone with basic computer competency (i.e. knows their way around a web browser, can upload pictures to a website, is proficient with e-mail, etc.) can get an e-commerce site up and running without having to hire any professional help. That said, Shopify is an e-commerce platform for the masses and might not be built to do exactly what you want in all cases. Fortunately they expose a number of extension points that let you dig into the inner workings of your site and tweak it to your liking. Unfortunately, without at least some background in computer programming and/or web development you will probably get lost pretty quickly. Shopify does maintain a “Job Board Forum” where you can post the custom tasks that you want to accomplish and have developers experienced with the Shopify platform bid on them.

And The Cost?

This is a blog about bootstrapping, so I’d be missing the mark if I didn’t talk about what all of this costs. To be clear, the costs I’m talking about here are solely for the creation and ongoing hosting of your website. This doesn’t include domain names, e-mail, advertising, or any of the other expenses involved with starting an online business.

If I had opted to build my own website from scratch the only real tangible cost I would have would be in the form of some basic shared hosting with a website hosting provider. Price ranges for this kind of service range from very cheap to very expensive, but I estimate that I’d probably have needed something in the neighborhood of $15 - $20 per month to get started.

With Shopify, they have a multi-tiered pricing scheme. The entry level plan costs about $25 per month. In addition, they charge a 2% transaction fee for each sale that takes place on the site. The $25 per month plan is a good one to get started with, but you’ll probably want to upgrade to the next level up before too long. The entry level plan doesn’t offer discount code functionality and limits the products you can sell to 100. The second level plan costs about $60 per month with a 1% transaction fee. Obviously, this is more money than the $15 - $20 that I estimated for the “from scratch” approach, but this doesn’t take into account the hours I would have had to spend building my own site. It’s difficult to estimate and quantity how many more hours I would have had to invest into the “from scratch” approach, but I have no doubt that it would have been a much larger effort overall.

Remember, your time is worth something. In my opinion, a service like Shopify is well worth the expense given the time you save.