Every hosting is unique in one way or another. My thinking was to get cheap hosting first while online store is under development and then when it’s ready to go live to switch to different hosting plan if needed. So I chose the cheap shared hosting, installed Magento shopping cart platform and everything seemed to be going well. Until I started importing about 11,000 products into shopping cart.

The whole process of importing these many products was a nightmare. The problem was around different limitations that hosting provider impose on shared hosting account such as memory limit, time out length, etc. So I was getting “500 Server Error” multiple times during different stages of import process. Even after I finished the products import I was still running into different issues due to hosting limitations. Plus hosting support wasn’t that great either.

Online store is still under development but I’m aggressively looking to switch to different hosting provider now. I’ve already made the research and found the hosting that is optimal for Magento based ecommerce stores. It offers the basic plan with the ability to easily upgrade to advanced plan.

So don’t repeat the same mistake I made. I wasted so much time because of it and now I have to spend time on moving the site over.

Old Way Of Hiring Web Designer

I ran through this last year when I was working on eCommerce project for the client. I’ve set up shopping cart platform, entered products and it was time for design. My client wanted something “special” although he didn’t know what exactly he wanted. So I went to Craigslist, paid $20 and put up an ad. Right away I started getting tones of proposals from all around the world (mostly from India of course). My client wanted local designer so I picked around 70(!) candidates for review and eventually picked the one that looked the most professional for the budget that I had.

Then the hell has started. My client has made the deposit, designer started working. I was passing requirements between my client and designer. Designer was submitting drafts. My client didn’t like those since he wanted something “special”. Designer reworked and submitted drafts again. Eventually it ended up that designer spent so much time that she started asking for more money. My client was like “What did I pay the deposit for?”… And the  project just failed.

New Way Of Hiring Web Designer

I’ve heard about 99Designs a couple of times and all good stuff. So I decided to give it a shot. Here is why I call it new way. With 99Designs you run the contest. Designers from all over the world start to participate submitting their drafts based on your requirements. You are free to ask participating designer to change something and they’ll be happy to make a change for the chance to win the contest. The only catch is you have to deposit money upfront to the special escrow account. If by the end of contest you pick the winning design these money will be transferred to the winner in exchange for the design source files. In worse case of scenario you’ll loose only $39 listing fee and get your money back.

Here are few things you need to be aware of to run the successful design contest:

1. Write as detailed contest requirements as you can. Include URLs of web sites that you like. Check other similar listings first to see how others write the requirements.
2. Don’t listen to 99Designs suggested prize for your contest. They put it the way high. For example they suggest to put $600 for web site design and you could get it for $300. The reason they put it so high is they charge %10 of the winning prize. Also check other contests that have already ended to see how much people paid.
3. Communicate with designers who participate in your contest. This way you can ask them to change something. Plus other designers will look up the comments and have a better understanding of what you want
4. If you don’t have logo design run the separate contest for it first. And then run a contest for the web site pages.
5. Note that the final outcome of the contest is one or more PSD files. Don’t expect to get your design in HTML/CSS format. This would be separate project that requires skill that not all designers have. I’ll write another article on this soon.

I hope this info will help you getting your design done. I had very positive experience with 99Designs. Please share your experience.

The reason I picked Magento was because of positive feedback I heard from others. The set of features it offers “out of box” is amazing and you are getting it all for FREE. You can taste Magento through this demo.

One particular feature that I love is layered navigation where you can filter your products by common sets of attributes. This is very useful when you have to offer a large selection of products. For example if you sell shoes, your website visitor can narrow it down to Mens shoes made by Kenneth Cole of Black color. In this case “Mens”, “Kenneth Cole” and “Black” are all different attributes that could be filtered by.

The first time I was upset with Magento was when I tried to bulk import special type of product (configurable product) and discovered that there is no native support for this. Thanks to the great community around Magento I was able to find the solution but it was such a waste of time.

Another thing that drove me crazy was the glitches after importing large amount of products. After I imported about 1,000 products my favorite layered navigation feature just stopped working. I wasn’t alone, the whole community was complaining about the same issue for more than a year. And the only way to resolve this issue was through the guy who found a work around. Chris McKee was so kind that he even worked on my hosting remotely to resolve the issue absolutely for FREE. Thanks Chris for helping me and many others!

There were many other little things that I wouldn’t mention here. But I’m proud that I made it through. I’ve imported around 9,000 products and the next step is to customize the design. Will keep you posted on the progress.

1. Get Domain Name

Every online business starts with domain name. The sooner you get it the sooner you will feel like you’ve already started your venture! The only catch is it MUST contain the main keyword that targets your chosen niche. Also, don’t make it long – 2-3 words is perfect. And don’t put dashes between words.

2. Pick The Right Shopping Cart Platform

There are many options. Some are free (open source) and some are commercial solutions. The first thing you need to do is to come up with the list of features your online store should have. Then you should pick a shopping cart platform that has most of these features and the missing features should be easy to implement. If you are technically savvy then free open source solution is right for you. If you are not then you should go with paid hosted solution. Just make sure you research the best provider.

3. Load Products

It all depends on how may products you have. If it’s below 1000 you may want to do it all manually. But if it’s above you should consider automatic import of products. Most of the shopping carts support bulk product import. For example you can list all products info in Excel document and then upload this document along with product images to your shopping cart. Then you can run product import with single click and just wait until all products got imported.

4. Site Design

This is the most time wasting step. Many newbies are wasting their time and money on fancy designs and eventually give up on the whole idea. The most important thing to understand is that to sell you need simple and easy to use design. And you can always tweak the design later on. The goal is to make your site unique in some way. Don’t waste time on fancy stuff.

5. Choosing The Payment Processor

In order to accept payments you need to find the payment processor and hook it up to your site. Again, you need to research before making the decision on which payment processor to use. Make sure you support PayPal as well since it’s becoming a standard for online payment options.

6. Market Your Site

Once your site went live, don’t expect making sales right away. In fact it may take a month or more before you get the 1st order. So after your site is up and running you should actively promote it through different channels: Pay Per Click advertisement, Social Networks and Search Engine Optimizations are the major ways to market your online store.

At this point I’m done with choosing the shopping cart platform and working on importing of about 9,000 products. I can afford to spend about 2 hours a day Monday through Friday. And I expect this project will take another 2 months. And I have already spent a month.

The niche is Designer Sunglasses from wide variety of brands. This niche is not that competitive (45 millions pages in Google) so it should be easy to market the site once it’s live. I plan to market it through Google Adwords PPC campaigns while we’ll be rising organic rankings through SEO.

So, stay tuned for the next articles. I’ll share my personal experience so you will see how easy (or hard) it is to build online store from the scratch. And we’ll celebrate together when the 1st sale is made .