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Friday, March 14, 2008

Finally finished my ecommerce site

I started a website to go along with my eBay store back in '06 when I opened the store. At the time I used Yahoo! Web Hosting and used their free WYSIWYG website building software "Site Builder" and built my own site. I spent AGES designing and had to configure my own shopping cart with html from PayPal and for a good long while I was very happy with it. I guess I was more proud than anything. It was so nice to say "I did it myself" and telling folks that I designed it all. Who knows what anyone else ever thought about it, but I was proud.
The downfall... it didn't do everything I wanted it to and it was very very time consuming. Any time one little change needed to be made I had to manually go to re-design every single page! I have over 400 items!!! Even at 2 minutes each, it would be over 13 hours of work to change one little thing. The other downfall, I could only access it from my one main desktop, so it tethered me to the back room.
I read somewhere that the downfall of most entrepreneur is not hiring someone to do things because they didn't want to let go of control. So, I took the leap. I researched around and since I was already happy with the customer service I got from Yahoo! I decided to upgrade to their Merchant Solutions program. This one uses a template and I just plug in the products much the same way that I do for eBay. I've lost a little creative control but from what I have learned about it so far, it is capable of doing more, I just need to learn how.
For now, it is pretty basic.
It took me a few weeks to set it all up. Mainly because I kept getting slowed down by keeping up with my two eBay stores and regular life getting in the way. Husband broke his jaw... spent a week in the hospital, baby decided that napping was no longer in the daily schedule, etc. etc.
It took a couple of calls to tech support, but the crazy thing is that every single time I called, the solution was overly simple and I was over-thinking the whole thing.
If you wanna check it out and see what you think, it is www.addictedtorockabilly.com

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