Thread: Belly Dance Business Advise

My daughter and I are acquiring a small business that has a large and diverse inventory and customer base.

We would like to reach out to the community to see what the collective experience is in the following matters:

- What software program do you use to build and manage your website?
- What techniques have you found useful in cataloging a diverse inventory set of 1 to 2000 items.
- What accounting software have you found useful and simple?
- What do you recommend in terms of caring insurance?
- How would you advise designing our website to create a good shopping experience?

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. If you think there are topics we have listed please let us know.

Congrats on the new business.

As far as carts go, there is a whole universe of options.
Something as simple as a yahoo store all the way to custom coded carts.

Things to consider:
budget, your computer skills, future need to add features/custom coding, credit card processing gateway/api to be used, shipping calculation requirements...
All cart ware handles stuff differently with different limitations. None are perfect but some are better than others. Carts are written in different languages, so choosing a cart and coder that work well together are key.

You may want to start out with an open source cart and pay for customization, skinning, etc.

Some popular solutions:
Wordpress with a cart module
Joomla with a cart module
X-cart
Zen Cart
Magento
OScommerce (used to be a bear to customize the code because the look and feel was hard coded into the functionality. May have changed)
Pinnacle Cart (used them a few years ago. good hosted solutions but limited flexibility. good reporting functionality)

In general, hosted solutions usually have higher monthly overhead but less work for the vendor. Licensing the software and hosting on your owner server may be cheaper but require more tech work, depending on your config and skill set.

Good luck! Can't wait to see what you are working on.

For bookkeeping, Quickbooks seems pretty standard. All the business owners I know use it.

I use OpenCart. I chose it because it integrated easily with my payment gateway. To take online payments you will need to have a merchant account, an online gateway, and an SSL certificate. You'll want to make sure everything you use works together.

In terms of design, K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Silly!). Don't get sucked into tons of gimicks. You need something with clean graphics and navigates easily. Anything beyond that is bells & whistles.

While you may walk into a business with a strong customer base, I'd be sure to have a marketing plan. Don't assume the current base will a) stay around, or b) will support your business. You need a plan for acquiring new customers on a regular basis. I think most businesses fail because they don't invest in advertising.