Bits on Building Inventories and Selling Online
End of July. Time to give Golria’s old site — horsefeathersmercantile.com — a new host machine, a new powering software engine and a new look. All these in spite of being swamped by couple other pending projects, bogged down by tens of thousands of feeds and pressured by the couple blogs I had to feed out at my turn. No fear, I said to myself, remember the ‘bits-n-bytes’ tactics:
1. Have the project run in the background for couple weeks; this means have it loaded in the cache about one month before the deadline (own’s brain cache).
2. Whenever landing in the control panel try not to forget doing just a little bit, like adding the domain, requiring the transfer, installing the Joomla CMS. Oh! The mySQL data base? No time now, maybe tomorrow. Then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, I created the data base. And so on…
3. Once more (eight?) bits are done, try bind them into a byte — like binding pages into files, sort of.
This way I arrived to a dreaded point: the inventory! Because Gloria’s Gourds and Arts and Handmade Soaps e-store runs a wide large inventory. It haunted me the other year (or was it 2004?) when I loaded her inventory onto an OS-Commerce online selling software engine. The OSC, Gloria argued, was nice but terribly hard for her to administer: “It’s so complex, I don’t understand a bit!” — aah, yes, the bits… So then I had to pick up a thin e-store PHP engine (only PHP, no mySQL, holding the data in text files), that was QuickCart. Neat. And Gloria loved it —or so she pretended— enough to do almost all her inventory online by herself (thru weekends Faye used to give a hand).
This status quo was running for over a year or so. The only downturn being on the SEO part of things, aka. “If you’ve built it they’ll never come, so go get drumming it to the public!” I’ve integrated a thin blog/news engine called CuteNews with Gloria’s e-store, but it seemed (a bit) too complicated to login on two separate administator panels, one for the inventory, orders, invoicing; the other for writing news, announcements, blogs, tell stories from past events, etc. The site was lacking traction and traffic. But this is the past.
Now I made sure I’ve got my three bytes alright: the domain, the files, the database. Then initiated couple bits more with populating some categories in the VirtueMart — this to give Gloria momentum over the inventory ‘transmutation’.
Called her, gave her some very little tips, some PDF docs, and here she is, couple of weeks later, with the new inventory uploaded, expanded and polished for her new e-store. Gloria never complained about the Joomla/VirtueMart aministrator panel (well, she mixed couple of jars at the beginning, but she figured it out in no time). This tells me that Joomla and VirtueMart are not scaring her, offering her the comfort of doing online commerce with no hassle from her own web site.
Me? I was spending bits of time here and there. Can’t tell if my time on this move summed up one day of work. Compare this to weeks and weeks of coding with the past installs.
See? The best solution for the developer is when he can avoid weeks of coding (and matching data bases) by replacing them with couple of clicks. Then the dream of every online boutique owner: to do inventory, invoicing, orders, payments, shipping options, etc. etc. in one place with yet a couple mouse clicks. Fear not, yee small biz owners! The web commerce realm has reached you, just a click away!
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