Alright so it’s been slow going on the site. We are still both working full time so we don’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to Performance Tread right now, but we are chugging along.

I have Magento setup on our new host and we are starting to add products. We are starting with the performance tires first since that’s really our initial target audience. It’s a slow process though we have to enter one by one for each model and each SIZE! It’s going to take forever. I have also been looking to see if we could get a csv file or something from the manufacturers with all the tire data so we don’t have to copy paste specs from their site one by one. Not much luck it’s like pulling teeth. We managed to get access to some good quality images for Goodyear and Michelin but no data. We have to figure something out for that or we will never finish adding these products.

I have also started looking into how we can do a by vehicle search since a lot of people have no idea what size tires they need or where to find their tire size. There is a company that sells the data of tire size for all makes and models or cars but it’s a bit pricey like $2k/year. Then I have to integrate it somehow into Magento. I think we will pass for now. I’m hoping our target customers are a bit more savvy about tire size than the average joe. Will just have a search by size for right now.

Still working on that deal I mentioned last time, hopefully I will have more to say on that soon. Also looking to partner up with a local rim manufacturer who is producing some very nice, very high quality rims. We keep debating if we want to carry a lot of items or just focus on the best stuff. We have the racing experience to know what works best and what doesn’t so why bother with the lower end stuff… not sure which way to go.

Last but not least I have started looking into shipping costs… I don’t like what I see. We setup a basic account with UPS and I compared some of the rates I got from other sites to what UPS was giving me for the same shipment. It was around double… ouch! Can’t be charging more than everyone else for shipping. I think it goes back to volume. So many little things we didn’t even think would be an obstacle keep popping up kind of demotivating. Anyways will be speaking to UPS rep soon to see what we can do.

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We have a name! Performance Tread Inc domains are purchased, corporation is set. Very excited we finally have a name for the business. Took us a while to come up with a name and even longer to come up with a name that had an available domain! There really arent many good domains left. I think we picked a good name though. Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Ok so my partner is working on a deal I’m very excited about! I don’t want to revel what it is yet because I’m afraid we will jinx it, but it will give us some credibility right out the door and could help us sell a few tires locally. Getting some sales under our belt will help a lot.

Now that we have accounts with distributors I’ve been doing some price checking and the margins on some of these tires are HORRIBLE! We would lose money trying to compete with some of the sites out there. That’s why this upcoming deal is so important. Could increase our sales volume so we can start negotiating better rates. If we can’t improve our rates we wont be able to compete, this concerns me.

On the technical side I’ve pretty much decided to go with Magento. I love it! Does most of what we need out of the box and there is a HUGE number of third party plugins that can do everything else. It is incredibly robust. Integrates with UPS, Paypal, Authorize.net and a lot of other right out of the box. It is not as fast of some of the others and seems to use a different MySQL database so some hosts don’t support it, but I have found some hosts that specialize in Magento.

I have also been playing with customizing it on the test server… it’s pretty confusing. Right now all I’ve been able to do is replace the existing images it comes with by just overwriting them with my own. Have to read up some more on how it’s all set up.

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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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