Posts tagged “Business”.
You are thinking about quitting your job. Launching your own business. Gathering a great team. Doing something meaningful. Changing the world.

Marvellous idea.

Fast forward to Day Two. Real life starts kicking in, stuff gets serious. You'll soon discover that it's a journey full of routine and burden of responsibility governed by the one and only God. The Cash Flow. And there's far too little Cash to keep the juices flowing. Not many will buy your stuff. Only your team, family and friends really understand how important your work is and how nice a guy you are. How great products you make. How much superior your product is to your competition.
 
Turns out that everyone else is busy manning their own holes to push their own products in exactly the same crappy situation. Competition is enormous, oxygen is scarce.

But hey — this will most probably change. You'll survive. If you really are good at what you are doing you can run but you can't hide. They'll discover you. You'll be drawn out from your little hole. Your products will be bought. Your passion and craftsmanship will be loved. You'll make at least a mid-sized dent in the universe.

You don't need to change the whole world. Change it for as many as you can. No one ever will reach each and everyone in the universe.

But do consider the marvellous idea of starting a new business diligently. Maybe switching your lousy job to a great one instead will do the trick. 
"I'd like to start selling stuff on my Edicy website. How can I?" -- a question I hear at least once a day. Good news is that there already are some online stores on Edicy. If your vision isn't too specific, it's fairly simple to build one too. Here's one of the most popular stores on Edicy — Mileedi, a flowers-by-mail service.

Mileedi — send flowers over internet

What's an online store?

An online store differs from an "ordinary" website by having little bit more technical complexity.

You need to have a way to

  1. show the products
  2. place an order
  3. pay it up.
All of this is readily available for you in Edicy. 

Larger, more established online businesses of course need more than that. There are some special components that are not available for such simple and convenient webstores — integrations with enterprise systems (inventory, CRM, logistics, book keeping) or user-specific options and purchase history.

Odds are though that you don't run a million dollar business looking for a new e-commerce platform. It's more likely you are someone like ourselves — running passionately a small business and getting started with your online success.

So let's see how you can do it with us.

1. Show me the products

The easiest way to show your products — if you only have a handful of them — is to create a normal content page for each of them under "Products" section. Add pictures, galleries and videos for visitors to get an overview. Write texts, include tables, add PDF-s with product overviews to specify the details. Link to reviews, add testimonials to build trust.

If you have a large number of different stuff on sale though, you ought to have more than that — new products should be listed first, best selling items need a place on the front page. Visitors should be able to group and filter them both by category or price or other characteristics. You need a product catalogue. There's an early beta version of such tool already available for a number of Edicy Plus users. So if you want to try it out just contact us and we help you set it up.

Another great option is to combine Edicy with Ecwid, a separate e-commerce tool that takes care for everything — provides you with a product catalogue and lets you manage prices, payment mechanisms and shopping carts.

2. Let me order it

Most often people only buy one item at a time. A pair of boots. A picture. A house. Sometimes you manage to sell more though. Two different pictures? A house AND a pair of boots? Could be.

Single-item-selling is rather easy to be set up with Edicy. Just set up a link for placing an order for every product separately.

Allowing user to order more than one product at a time is a bit more difficult — you'd have to provide visitors with a "shopping cart" for that. Visitor adds anythig to the cart first and then places the order for the whole pack. There's one great free component that you can either set up yourself or ask our support team to do it for you. It's called simpleCart — just go on and check out how conveniently it works.

If you decided to use Ecwid in the previous paragraph, you already have a shopping cart out of the box with them.

3. Let me pay for it

There are many options to choose from — a half-online method with money transfer in the end (works well with local businesses) or full online experience — paying with PayPal or credit card.

Credit card payments provided by PayPal — and Paypal wallet itself — work well with Edicy, you don't need any additional service. Just add a Paypal checkout link to each product or use simpleCart shopping cart in-between and done you are.

If you have more specific needs — for example direct payments through online banks are pretty popular around Europe — you can set up basically any payment mechanism with Ecwid.

Again — we are eager to help each and everyone of you get started with e-commerce just go on, contact us and we'll quickly help you out!
These are some happy days we live in. A decade ago businesses spent thousands of dollars per year to buy and upgrade sloppy box software. Now you can try out and subscribe to any kind of wonderfully crafted web service that not only cover all the box software tasks but invent completely new kinds of collaboration tools on top of them.

Here are our five favorite collaboration tools which have helped our team to become significantly more productive over the last few years.

Call to Japan for free.

SkypeYou're guessed it, we're talking about Skype. Almost everyone has a Skype user, almost everyone has used it for once. At least. So why aren't you using it for your business? It's a perfect tool whether you're communicating with your co-workers, talking to your clients, partners or even making conference calls across the world. You can keep your beloved smartphone but use Skype whenever you can. No need to waste your profit, or what?

Forget Microsoft Office (on desktop).

Office 365Back in 90's, you must have loved MS Office. But, hey, it's 2013! Google Drive (Apps)
Google Drive
 — and MS Office online — are here for you now. Of course, you can write a doc in MS Word, save it on your hard drive, then send it to your colleague, let him download it, edit, send back and so on. Sounds a bit pointless, when you can edit it online inside a browser window and get it done right there (on-site management, just like Edicy) — together with your whole team.

Track how much time you waste every day.

TogglNow, when you got 8 working-hours, then how much of it is spent on each task you have? Well, you can either take a wild guess OR you can track your time. Our developers have gone with Toggl, a tool developed by fellow-Estonians who run their business in California. Thanks to Toggle, we now know exactly on which project our time was spent. Besides, tracking time will help you a lot when it comes to reporting your big boss-man.

Enlighten your project managers.

BasecampOkay, you can keep your precious project managers. But you can make their and your life much easier by using the right tools. In Edicy, we use two different tools to manage our tasks. Developers, coders and designers have grouped their tasks into PivotalTracker, allowing all the members to add new and modify already existing tasks. On the other hand, our non-development team has chosen Basecamp. But in the end, they both serve the same goal — keeping your business on track.

In conclusion, stop wasting your money, time and nerves by using ancient tools just because you didn't know any better. Ditch inefficiency and take your business to another level.

Every subscription service like, say, cellular network, newspapers and doorstep milk delivery — or internet apps like Edicy — is getting new subscribers signing up constantly. If it wasn't accompanied by churn on the other end, each service would finally end up taking over the universe after the last living man has subscribed. So churn rate is a ratio of subscribers who end up discontinuing the service when facing request to extend it.

To put it plain and simple — if 1000 people extending your monthly subscription service are accompanied by 50 quitters then you have two important numbers:

  • your churn rate is 5%
  • you've got 50 payers less.
Even though they express the same thing, they have to be looked separately.

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