We are selling our e-commerce web site: www.tickon.com.

Why are we selling? Becuase we have more projects to work on, and we simply don’t have time to operate the business side of the e-commerce site, and that includes marketing the site, fulfilling orders, finding new products, and most importantly — providing excellent customer service.

How much are you selling for? Make your best offer and we will consider every bid.  We just want the site to be in good hands; someone willing to put in the effort to market the site.

What’s included? We will include the domain name, help you move to your desired web hosting company? or we will host it for you for a small monthly fee. You will also have the code (the site runs on Magento 1.2.1), and the existing database, and you will be hooked up with the product supplier for future order fulfilment (they are a great supplier to work with!!).

For more information email me at jerry at casualcommerce dot com

blog posting, e-commerce, magento e-commerce, for sale, magento, tickon.com

We just got our first online order on Tickon.com (our very own Magento-based e-commerce site)!! YEAH!!! But we weren’t even ready for order taking yet!! Paypal Pro hasn’t been setup and logistics haven’t been figured out out…yikes!!

Contacted Paypal to expedite the site approval process, and contacted our vendor with shipping the item…all done in 1 afternoon.  Everything is under control now, I was able to use Paypal’s virtual terminal to key in the CC info and all’s well!  So far.

When I was getting ready to print out the packing slip and the invoices for my vendor to ship the product, I noticed that the plain vanilla invoices and packing slips didn’t include my store’s logo nor address.  Make sure you get those on if to build your store’s brand identity!! Or atleast so that the customer knows where this package came from!

I browsed in the Magento admin interface, and looked everywhere but couldn’t find the form to fill in the store address nor an image for the outputted PDF file.  After some googling i found the thread that talks about this…and the location to configure this IS in the admin interface…just that it wasn’t placed at a very intuitive location. To customize the logo and the store address on the invoice, go to: System (at the top), Sales (on the left side), and Invoice and Packing Slip Design (third tab in the middle).  Upload the images, and type in your store address.  All Done.

NOTE: Picture shown is what was purchased. Very cool Queue 2-Tone Stick Lighter.

blog posting, e-commerce, magento, technical notes customize, e-commerce, invoice, lighter, magento, pdf, tickon.com

Just came across news of Magento Commerce’s latest release of Magento 1.2.0.1, time for another round of download and studying of the new and improved Magento.  Hopefully we will see a boost in site performance.

e-commerce, magento e-commerce, magento, software

After countless number of projects in developing e-commerce web sites for clients, it has finally hit me that most of the small companies and entrepreneurs simply don’t have the 1) time, 2) knowledge, 3) money, 4) manpower to run and operate an e-commerce web site. A lot of the time, customers simply want to build a site, hoping that once the site is launched, orders would roll in without them having to do anything..well that may be true 10 years ago, but in today’s online landscape, having an online storefront is not much different from operating a physical brick-n-mortar store…lots of effort is required.

In order to have a good site, the store owner would need to have the following (this may serve as a good starting point for a checklist, but it is far from complete)

1. product information (SKU #, Product Name, Product Description, Price, Inventory, Categorization)
2. product images (the quality of the product photography essentially makes or breaks your site, if you don’t have good product photography, you may as well stop thinking about launching the site)
3. domain name - your store should have a easy to remember web address, start searching for a domain name if you haven’t already. Yahoo domain is pretty good for finding domains, but Godaddy is cheaper to perform the registation.
4. corporate identity - having a good logo to go along with a domain name is important in building a brand for your business; you need to make your brand memorable, and having a good logo is a good start. To say the least, it makes small stores look more professional and bigger than they actually are.
5. web site - you will need a web developer and graphic designer to help you build out the store from idea to reality, you will need to know what you want in the site, and how the store would look like.  store looking around on sites like amazon.com, gap.com, walmart.com (some of the most popular e-commerce sites) to get a better understanding of how you want to site to look like and what features you would like to have in your site.

Once you have accomplished all the above, it is time to start thinking about promoting the site, we will talk more about web promotion in a future post.

In conclusion, there’s a lot of work required in building an e-commerce web site.  We, at Casual Commerce, understand that, and would like to offer a service in which we will take care of all the technical and tedious work that future store owners have no time to deal with.  For a monthly fee, we will offer the following:

1. Help you register you domain name (you pay the registration fee)
2. Help you design a corporate identity (logo, business cards, stationary headers, etc.)
3. Build your store, incorporating the corporate identity.
4. Product information maintenance
5. Product photography
6. Web site promotion
7. Email set up
8. Technical support related to your web site

The store owner’s job…focus on bringing in sales.  Happy E-commerce.

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