And so it starts!
We have recently decided to launch a new ecommerce site selling tires geared towards racers and enthusiasts. I though it would be good to document the entire process from start to finish as a reference for anyone else out there looking to start their own ecommerce site. If we succeed or if we fail it will all be documented here for others to learn from.
Let’s start with some backstory. I’m a web designer by trade and one of my friends approached me for some advice on starting an ecommerce site to sell tires. I gave him my thoughts on the technical side, make sure you go with something scalable, make sure its open source so you can tweak it down the road, get a host that will scale etc. At the time I was looking for some business opportunities to get involved in so we decided to partner up. He would handle the sales and tire side (he is a racer and huge car guru) and I would handle the technical side of setting up the site, marketing etc.
So here we are. My partner has contacted some of the local tire distributors for the major brands we want to carry and opened accounts with them. We can now buy tires at dealer prices. It was a little harder than I thought it would be. He had to kind of ease his way in to let him open accounts without doing buyings and what not of a few hundred tires (we are trying to start this business with as little upfront cash as possible). He’s very good at dealing with people I don’t think I would have had the same success if I did it myself.
While he sets up these accounts I’ve been looking into what shopping cart I want to use. I haven’t done an ecommerce site in a while so I’m seeing a lot of new carts out there. I really want something scalable that will handle most of our needs out of the box. My favorite right now is a cart called Magento. However I have some concerns as it seems to run very slow on my test server. Lots of features though.
Until next time
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