Tips for Creating an Online Store

Hey everyone. You may have noticed that we have added a bunch of new features in the past month. I have been busy developing from my new home base in Austin, TX, and there’s much more coming soon. Here’s what you can look forward to in the near future:

• Reorganized and cleaned up Add and Edit product pages that will be MUCH easier to use
• Shipping rates by product weight
• Inventory management – keep track of how many products you have in stock, with the option of stopping sales when you are sold out
• Multiple images per product
• Premium design template library from our new design team

You ask for it, you get it. These are the top feature requests we have gotten. Stay tuned for our big release.

Be part of the chosen few. Privileges on MySpace.

This weekend a store owner asked me if I knew of any good tools to make her product pictures look better. I did a little research and found Picnik!

Picnik is a really sweet tool for photo editing. It lets you do all the normal stuff like resize, crop, rotate, etc. But their other features like auto fixing which adjusts the color levels in the photo… I was blown away by this feature alone! You can also add frames, colors, shapes, and text. It pretty much does anything I would ever want for my photos. Let me know what you think of it.

Entrepreneur.com wrote up a story about us. It talks about our plans for the future and our back story.

We are all pretty excited about it! I am a BIG fan of the site.

Online customers need to have confidence in a store before they are willing to make a purchase. They need to feel confident that they are actually going to get what they order, and that you are a reputable business.

Here are some tips on how you can increase your customer confidence:

1. List your complete contact information, including your name, address, and phone number, in case people have a question about a product that they are thinking about buying. Seeing only an email address on the contact page may make your store appear a bit shady. You might even consider investing in an 800 number so customers know that you are willing to address their concerns on the phone.

2. List your certifications with reputable organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, or other professional organizations. Increase your customer base by showing that you are internationally reputable. Put these certifications on your About page.

3. Get customer testimonials and post them on your homepage. This shows that other people are willing to vouch for the quality of your products and of their buying experience with you. Follow up with your customers after they receive an order and ask them about their experience and if they would be willing to give you a recommendation.

4. Use your About page to tell people who you are and help them get to know you.
How long have you been in this business? What made you get into it? Why do you enjoy it? People like to buy from businesses made of real people.

Basically, just let visitors know that you are a reputable and reliable store. If they feel confident in that, they are much more likely to get out their credit card and buy something from you.

Entering in products that are very similar?   Now you can “Clone” any existing product and save time listing similar products.

TheFind.com now crawls all Flying Cart stores!  You can view all Flying Cart store products here.

I am excited to be involved in Wisconsin Entrepreneurship week this year. I will be speaking with high school students all across Wisconsin about starting and running a business. Feel free to tune in online.

Have a ton of products? Want to make quick updates? Have an eBay store and want to make a quick transition to Flying Cart.

Well now you can! All you need to do is upload an Excel CSV file with your product details and you are good to go. You can find the Bulk Upload feature under the products tab.

Bulk Upload was whipped up by our brilliant Tech Arch Brian Beermann. If you love this feature all the credit goes to him.