Like many other small creative business’s we started out by selling our products on marketplace sites like Etsy and Folksy. Both these sites have served us well over the years and truthfully we wouldn’t be where we are now if it wasn’t for them. Start up costs are low, they provided us with a wealth of guidance and knowledge and most importantly they already have an audience which means they helped bring traffic to our totally ‘unheard of’ shop. However as our business has grown, our requirements have changed, and the desire to have an online shop which we have control over has become greater. Earlier on this year we made the decision to finally take the plunge, and although it’s a little different from our normal posts, here are the 5 things we learnt as a creative business whilst designing our e-commerce shop.
1 – Research
We know. Everyone always says research is key and although it’s boring, it’s true. We started by researching into all the different website providers, their costs and the packages they offered. For us having a provider that allowed an e-commerce site at a reasonable cost was the most important requirement. So we looked for company that allowed us the most freedom at a cost we could afford. We also knew we had very little free time to design our website, so it was going to be a few months before we were ready to launch. Therefore we chose a company that allowed us to use their website builder for free until we were ready to make our site live. Which brings us nicely into the next lesson.
2 – Time Planning
We worked out a rough plan of when we wanted to launch the website. As we knew the design process was going to take us a few months we aimed for the end August as this gave us plenty of time not to feel rushed but also a target to work to. This meant we didn’t take longer than necessary. It was also a suitable time for our business because it was before the Christmas rush, and as we all know, things like this always take longer than you think! In fact, having worked on website design each week, we still had quite a big push in August to get the site ready.
Photo by Olya Kobruseva on Pexels.com
3 – Designing
This was definitely the most enjoyable part but it still required a lot of thought. We wanted quite a clean modern look to our website, but as a business selling traditional writing paper our original branding had quite a regal feel to it. As a result we decided to use certain colours from our branding within our website to give a cohesive look, along with some decent photographs. We actually found that we only needed a handful of good photos around the site to tie everything together. Excluding product photography of course! Which is something we are STILL working on. But really, does anyone EVER finish their product photography?
Screen shot of our website. We picked out the burgundy and blue from our original branding to incorporate in the design.
4 – Final Stages
No matter how much you plan life has a funny way of throwing you little cureveballs. As we finished the design part we had to move on to the more technical stuff like SEO and making sure all details were correct for our country. Easier said than done. If we were to offer advice it would be start at least a week before you plan to launch as all these things take time to process. It also allows time for technical glitches to be sorted as nothing ever seems run smoothly when you are working to a deadline……
5 – Promotion
Truthfully we haven’t worked out the best way to do this yet. If anyone has any good ideas please let us know! We did plan a few posts in the lead up to the launch to let people know we would shortly have our online shop, which did seem to get people talking. But as we all know social media has it limitations! So we also made sure we updated our printed materials and changed all our links across the web.
Facebook posts that we posted in the run up to our website launch. Original posts can be found at https://www.facebook.com/designbycottagerts/
And there we go! That’s as much as we know. We won’t pretend to be experts, because we’re not. We just wanted to share our experience as a creative business and to be honest it still remains to be seen whether the work has been worth it. But if you would like to take a further look, our web address is http://www.cottagerts.com. It’s also worth noting until the 30th September 2021 we have 10% off all our products using the code ‘LAUNCH21’.
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