First of all welcome to DIY Ecommerce Guide from Tamebay. While Tamebay has traditionally focussed on helping all of you eBay-ers and other marketplace traders achieve huge success, this part of the Tamebay empire – brought to you by me, Paul Skeldon – aims at helping those of you that want to start building and running your own online ecommerce store(s) to compete with the big boys.
The DIY Ecommerce Guide will build over the next few weeks into an eight-part compendium of how to make that happen, from Part 1: Start – which looks at how to register a name right through to building a site – on to mobile, marketplaces, promotions, conversion, retention and expansion, shipping and legal matters – so that you can, if you need to, start at the beginning with nothing and end up with a globe-straddling ecommerce empire by the end (Ed – we can’t guarantee this).
But enough of that: why, you ask, are you reading this newsletter? This newsletter will accompany the DIY Ecommerce Guide every fortnight through the year looking at each of those eight sections in much more depth and adding the most up-to-date examples, case studies, interviews and technology to enhance the book.
And, come September 2018, we start all over again – publishing the 2018 DIY Ecommerce Guide that will be full of the latest thinking and examples from the year gone by to keep you up to date.
This week we kick things off with the basics: How to settle on a name and how to build a website. As you will see, we have some expert advice from Hiro Tsukahara, CEO, GMO Registry, on how a name and URL – and especially the suffix after the ‘dot’ – are vital to being found; we then explore how to come up with a good name, including a raft of tools that can help you; and on to how to choose a web-building tool – both in terms of what you need and a list of some of the best ones. And for inspiration we showcase five of the our favourite sites that combine excellence of design with clarity of purpose and ease of use.
Between them these show how simply getting going with turning your business idea or passion into an actual functioning business is not for the faint hearted and requires creativity and thought from the get go – or even before the get go.
Of course, these are the basic steps to starting on your ecommerce journey. They rest of DIY Ecommerce Guide Part 1: Start includes all the really fun stuff – from setting up a checkout, to taking payments and beyond. In the next newsletter we shall look at payments in great detail and build on the basics that are outlined in the book. Between them you should have a great insight into how to get going and how to make money.
In the meantime, do let us know what you think and more importantly what you need to learn. We can build this book together by taking on your problems and issues – and ideas – and adding them in to the mix. So we’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line at:
