Natural Selections eco-retail

[jwhiz]

Prestashop was suggested by our hosting service, Ethical Hosting in Ontario, Canada (http://www.ethicalhost.ca/). We have a professional web designer doing this for us as her gift to help get our business started, she continues to troubleshoot (and the site code is probably pretty unique by now!). The actual scutwork (inputting stock and descriptions, researching site terms & conditions, shipping policies, etc.) was mostly my partner and I. She has no advanced computer skills and I've only ever done web sites with HTML editors, so, WOW.

Our site url is: http://nsecostore.ca

There are tons of ideas for promoting on the web, but as we're targeting people in southwestern Ontario to start, we're also doing as much legwork as we can imagine. We will be wandering around our neighbourhoods later this week with flyers and business cards - how old school is that! - but still cheaper than ineffective and outrageously priced newspaper ads these days.

We sent surveys to people in the fall researching attitudes towards eco-goods, then sent "we are officialy open" emails to those same people two weeks ago when we decided that our site was "done" (all web sites are a work in progress, but we had our catalog up and available from all our suppliers, and had tested cart several times). We added cash payment options after "official opening" and our web designer friend is working on a truly printable catalog to add to the site.

We have Facebook pages, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles. We have a blog attached to our site (WordPress) which I have been writing posts for long before our retail site was officially open, and have a list of local bloggers to check out - one has already linked to us from his site, so I returned the favour.

Yes, buying the stock and then announcing the site is tense. We have had three sales in first week, and are boosting our presence with home parties - the first one in another week.

Having a complex but usable software solution like Prestashop available as an open source project is tremendous. I understand that open source software is a labour by people who are really interested in what they are doing. And our site looks professional right away, rather than hours of sketching and trying out layout ideas. Nothing prevents me from doing that for personal sites. But I can't imagine trying to build a complex retail site like ours without something like this. Cool. :coolsmile: