Phoebe : Thanks for following the T-shirt Experiment!

Hey All!

It has been fun conducting the T-shirt experiment with Kristi and Anh! Thanks to those who have been following our blog but it has now come to the end of the experiment.

From this small adventure of starting an online business I’ve learnt that even someone like me who has no web programming experience can launch a website that sells products! It’s exciting to know that it’s possible and manageable. I’ve also learnt that a website doesn’t just manage itself but it’s like a baby that you need to nurture and grow. Also, I think the best way to market the site was to use social networking like Facebook and LinkedIn where there’s a lot of traffic so you’re then able to draw traffic into your store. The other way to drive more traffic to your store is definitely Google Adwords and selecting the correct keywords can really help boost traffic flow to your store. Also, if I had time and budget I would market my website offline too, give out postcards and advertise in a magazine etc.

I think I’d do a couple of things differently if I could. I’d probably set a time for the website everyday if I could and also set a schedule or business plan so I could follow it so I can keep track of what things I’d need to do. Also, I think it would have been helpful for me to actually get some advice from people who have successful websites and find out why and draw inspiration from them. The business and the sales part definitely wasn’t as easy as what I thought it’d be. It’s probably not what a lot of people want to hear when they first start, but it takes a lot of time to make it work!

The experiment has been a really cool and fun way to learn about selling t-shirts online. The setting up, website layout and branding was my favourite part. The challenging aspect to me was the marketing and driving traffic to my site and actually encouraging people to buy is the hardest part. I realised that it takes a lot of persistence to keep working at the site, so in a way it’s like a real store where you must continuously change the look of it, add new products and also build up a database who you can email regularly to build a relationship with the customers.

So I think using DecoNetwork has been a really easy way to start an online business. It was easy to choose products that you want to sell and also to manage the store layout. I think it’s a very strong and useful tool that has everything that you need. It’s quite a detailed software that can be used to create a strong website layout and then all the backend things like pricing, managing orders and viewing how many people come into the webstore is all there and available. It almost has things that I thought I didn’t need but it was created to make it quicker for me to update, add content and also change the layout of the website. So I guess it’s a really powerful platform that can be used and it depends where you want to take it.

Thanks again for following our experiment and Good luck with your own webstore too!

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