A course in Entrepreneurship E-commerce basics required starting an e-comm venture from scratch. I had already begun the process, but that wasn’t acceptable; I needed to do a comparison and had to at least start the second option from scratch. Fair enough. What was the result? Interesting. Here’s the gist of my presentation (I won’t bore you with the slideshow version).
Sure, all the successful people try to tell you it’s easy. What they don’t tell you is that a lot of them just hired a company to make it magically appear on the internet for them so they can then take over and brag about how much money they’re making.
In July, I set out to begin my process of turning my original artwork – most of it drawn or painted by hand – into graphic design by (a) learning first how to convert or recreate it using Illustrator and Photoshop (successfully did that through Creative Cloud subscription), then (b) to find an acceptable company to handle the print-on-demand onto good quality shirts and other items (I’ve tried a few and found a highly-rated printer had crappy selection of apparel, so nope on them), and then (c) make all of the tech components work together so e-comm can actually start without my head exploding in the process. Spoiler alert: that last bit is the hard part.
What I’ve learned so far about making the last part happen (good, bad and wtf) in case anybody wants to be brave and take their creativity to a place where people actually pay you for being your awesomely creative self is as follows:
1. Moving my BigBlackDogStudio.com WordPress.com blog over to WordPress.org hosting so that it could theoretically add e-comm was not as one-click simple as they like to make out. The “export” feature that encourages you to click “all” does not take into account the sheer volume of a long-standing blog. I followed those instructions, and when I imported the file to its new home, was horrified that only posts up through 2014 were present. My eyebrows didn’t come down for a week until I finally figured out on my own in mid-August how to download each year’s worth of posts separately in order to then “import” them to the .org version. You’d think that might warrant a caveat or at least a helpful hint posted in their tutorials, just putting that out there. Ahem.
2. If you wish to use an order submission form or even just a subscriber optin through any platform other than those sponsored or favored by WP, good luck with that. Security issues simply block it. So as to your expended funds on existing CRM software? Don’t annoy yourself trying to integrate. Just use the WP-favored form and periodically download the list as a CSV file and upload new subscribers that way into your preferred CRM software. I personally use ClickFunnels for my lead capture, but WP won’t let their optin embed on my site. At all. There’s no point aggravating yourself. It’s an extra step going the CSV route or copy & paste or just manually entering, but it actually saves time knowing their rules and just playing by them. The only alternative was creating a subdomain and assigning that lock, stock and barrel for my ClickFunnel pages. Not a solution; it’s a work-around.
3. As an alternative to WP’s fair-haired child Woocommerce, I decided to check out Shopify. Rule #1: at the very beginning when they ask you what you want the name of your store to be, don’t put in spaces or else they insert dashes. If I wanted my site to be called “big-black-dog-studio,” I would have named it that to begin with. I don’t. Good thing there’s a 14-day free trial I let expire.
4. Speaking of which, Shopify’s instructions for using a domain you already own requires switching the A and CNAME over to them. They don’t care who your registrar is, but you can create a new entity through them if you want. Trivia fact: a WP.org self-hosted site’s A and CNAME information being changed to Shopify equates to: “why the hell am I paying for WP.org self-hosting if I’m using Shopify as my platform?” Redundant expense is what that is. Can I simply add a subdomain to my WP.org domain and CNAME it over to Shopify? No. The A domain information must be Shopify’s IP address. So, how about Shopifying the A and CNAME info with them, and then creating a subdomain for your blog? Why bother when you can add a blog page and other non-selling pages through Shopify as a platform? So, this comes down to an “either – or” situation. Pick one: WP.org + Woocommerce or Shopify.
5. Printful vs. Customcat comparison. They both have high marks for their print quality because I’ve ordered sample merch from both. “Direct to garment” or DTG printing is different than traditional screen printing as the inks embed into the fabric versus being a layer of paint melted on top of the fabric. What that means is that if your designs are super-rich and vibrant in color, some of that is going to be dulled by DTG technique. Translation: instead of a piece of paper going through your printer, you could stick a t-shirt in there and have it print on the cloth. Screen printing necessitates set-up and clean-up, so that’s great for a large batch of printing, say, to create physical inventory if you have a brick-and-mortar shop. But for taking online orders from anybody from anywhere online, screen-printing one item as requested is not feasible. Pick your battles and decide how you want to compromise if deep, vibrant color is part of your brand. Also keep in mind that while those bright and vibrant colors print out just find through DTG, the real trouble happens is when you try to print those bright colors on a dark t-shirt. Even Printful makes a point on their site explaining how on dark fabrics they do a white layer first as the base and then apply the color design because they know it’s a problem. Keep it in mind. Both Printful and Customcat get high marks from me for the quality of the printing, but the choices of apparel items available through Printful are few and most are not up to the kind of quality standards I would choose to wear. If I don’t like the quality, what will my customers think of the quality? Will they give my shop bad reviews based on the shirt quality as opposed to my fabulous designs? Yeah, probably. Customcat’s wide selection of apparel items include not only just about everything I saw on Printful, but a lot more. For instance, I want moisture-wicking athletic wear as well as heavy-duty t-shirts, not crap that will fall apart after a few washes. I had choices of wicking tees as well as the classic Hanes Beefy Tee on Customcat, but it wasn’t even an option on Printful. So noted.
6. How did I get to the point I’m at? Customcat works well with Shopify and had their own app made to integrate the two. One less player in the game to worry about. Shopify allows me to add extra non-merch pages as well as blog posts on their platform like I can do with my blog. Customcat app on Shopify automatically handles shipping costs. I like that and went through the process of setting up a storefront there to test it out. Back over on my WP.org site using Woocommerce, I had used one of my WP.org domain names to test Printful’s Woocommerce app. Setup with the Printful app was easy, ordering was easy, products showed up at my door 7 to 10 days from the time I placed the order. Shirt quality of the Bella+ Canvass 3001 I was not so happy with at all. If you’re into the budget t-shirt market, go for it. It was easy and you use your WP.org account site. So, I then deleted all of that and reassigned the WP.org domain over to Shopify with the A and CNAME zones changed as mentioned above. I went through the Customcat app’s product creation process again for a t-shirt in range of sizes and three color choices. I hit export, and the product appeared on Shopify.
7. That said, you’d think, “oh, Shopify is the clear winner” now wouldn’t you? It would be if I wanted to list every different colored product as a separate product instead of having one t-shirt show up on the site with a list of all its options. Nope. You have to manually go in and duplicate the variables. And it might be worth the trouble if it weren’t another $30 a month or well over $300 a year additional on top of what I’ve already got as tools in my arsenal.
Bottom line: I let the Shopify free trial expire and switched my A and CNAME zones of the domain I used back to my WP.org hosting service, Bluehost. I am using WP.org with Woocommerce and using Customcat through their website as opposed to through their Shopify app. It’s like the middle ground and it’s working for me. Temperamental and glitchy as Woocommerce can be, it’s my better bet financially to get started with e-comm because I’m already in their house. In other words, when tempted by shiny objects, think about the value of renovating where you’re already planted versus jumping too quickly into the “fast and easy” claims out there. If, however, I were to start brand new with no deeply entrenched Google statistics behind me like on my 10 year old blogs, I’d happily go with Shopify for its clean, modern look and ability to still look and work well on mobile devices. Woocommerce is really cute to think that they’re as good at that, too. I am also looking into simply using the whole Woocommerce thing as merely a portal purchasing site and fulfilling my apparel orders locally to my home since many print shops now have the same capabilities as Customcat and Printify. I can control the quality and ship the products myself.
So, my BigBlackDogStudio.com shop is simply part of my original blog. I moved all the extraneous pages (posts included) and content under one menu heading, and the only other menu choices now are “Cart” and “Shop.” I’m pretty happy with how it looks overall. Now, to just figure out how to get that darn “subscribe to our mailing list” optin function to work…….!
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