Want to create an online store?

Last year I started to think about trying to create an online store. I didn't really have a specific product in mind, but I wanted it to be a niche market to avoid a lot of competition, and I wanted it to have a price point of at least $50 to make it more feasible to maintain a margin. That seemed simple enough until I realized that since the eighth grade I've bought every piece of clothing I've owned at The Gap, J.Crew, or Banana Republic. I'm not exactly "niche," and it was a challenge to come up with product that met that criteria. Last spring though, I was thinking about trying worm composting again and came across Nature's Footprint. They offered a drop-ship reseller program, and their product seemed to be the perfect match. I looked into it a little more. The bins were certainly "niche" and the prices/markups were high enough to feasibly make a solid profit on a few sales. All I had to do, it seemed, was become an official reseller, build a site, and market the bins. But any time I spent trying to create the site, I became pretty frustrated with my lack of web development experience. There were some pretty cool tools available to create a fairly nice website but nothing seemed to offer enough to create a real online store.

I played around with Weebly a lot. I had used it in Nicaragua to create the beginnings of a website for our Peace Corps class, La Empresa Creativa, and it was pretty useful to quickly build a functioning site, but their online store features were pretty inadequate. I didn't get very far and ended up just kind of shelving the idea for awhile.

A few months ago though, Simon sent me a link to Jimdo. It works a lot like Weebly but makes it very easy to set up a store. You can set prices, shipping rates, pictures, and product variations all by just dragging and dropping preset site elements from the toolbar. You can then link a PayPal account to your Jimdo account and within 30 minutes have the basics of an online store set up. I was excited and decided to give the worm bins a shot.

I applied and became a reseller, bought a URL for $8 from GoDaddy, had Luke Emeott create a logo, and used Jimdo to build the site. I shelled out $60 to Jimdo to have a little more freedom in the site design, and had it all up and ready within about two weeks. $68, little web development experience, and no product inventory, and the Urban Worm was born. I had created a "business."

I use quotation marks because it's not much of a "business" if it doesn't actually sell anything or if it sells something but doesn't turn a profit. Quite frankly, it'll be hard to do both for some pretty clear reasons I'll get into in an upcoming post. But, for anyone interested in creating an online store, I'd encourage you to check out Jimdo.