The whole point of this series has been to educate our customers and potential customers about what it really takes to build out a webstore, because quite frankly, most people have no idea how big of a process it actually is. Once we get the site designed and built, and the security and credit card processing is working, we get to the fun* part.
On our end, that fun means lots and lots of testing on our end to make sure the site works, every time. Nothing scares off your customers faster than the store malfunctioning during a credit processing transaction.
It is during this time that you, as the shop owner, also get to start learning how to manage your store and adding in your product. If you’re like most of the customers we deal with, you probably have hundreds of products to sell. It should be obvious to you, then, that you have hundreds of photos to shoot, and hundreds of descriptions to write. If you don’t have an inventory management system already in place, you also have hundreds of product SKUs to created. And possibly sizing charts. And product options (like color or finish). You will need to figure out what product is going to be featured on the front page. What product shows up as related product on a customer views something else. Again, all of these steps have to be done potentially hundreds of times.
In short, you have a lot of work ahead of you. You’re going to be pretty sick of that cute t-shirt design (see above, courtesy of mentalfloss.com) by the time this is done. It might be time to get an intern or hire a teenager on the weekends to help you out.
*Note: Not actually fun.
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