Barbara (Bitsy to her friends) had approached our class previously to set up a website blog for her to showcase her knitting interests. Using WordPress, a simple site (bitsys_bits.com) was designed for her, which she was quite pleased with and garnered her a decent following. However, she had now accumulated a substantial number of baby booties that she had produced for the numerous projects she had posted to her blog. She now approached the class for help in setting up an e-commerce site to sell her backlog of baby booties.
We first sat down with Barbara (aka Bitsy) after reviewing 2 websites which outlined what should be included on a site to provide a good shopping experience.
https://www.ecommerceceo.com/learn/what-is-ecommerce/ and https://sell.amazon.com/learn/what-is-ecommerce
As we already had some background on Barbara (Bitsy) from our previous project and after determining where she is now with her site and projects, we recommended adding WooCommerce to her site. Our decision was based on the following:
- Cost (Since this is home based start-up, helps keep overhead low)
- WordPress compatible (Client using WP already so is familiar with modular content management and page building so small learning curve)
- Less technical/easy to use (Her skills lie more with knitting than IT so will be easy for her to manage)
- Geared for smaller product lines (Only sells baby booties, although many colors and patterns are offered, so ability to host large number of products not needed; does not foresee building a huge empire )
- Included features for handling payments, refunds and shipping (Since she doesn’t have a business background, assistance with these type of business details helpful)
- Highly customizable (Can integrate store front design seamlessly into her existing blog)
- Expandable with large number of plug-ins (May want to sell her patterns in the future as a digital downloadable product — we recommended Easy Digital Downloads plug-in if she’d like to pursue that option https://easydigitaldownloads.com/?utm_source=home&utm_medium=description_tab&utm_content=home&utm_campaign=readme)
Client agreed with our assessment and accepted our recommendation.
This is a fictionalized account of an event that may or may not have really happened, anywhere or at anytime.