Comment by briancary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by briancary | Hacker News Reader

Definitely agree that it doesn't look like a shop. Checkout my friends dropshipped-powered site http://seriouslyscuba.com - also inspired by Tim Ferriss' muse concept. If I were you I would quickly move away from wp-commerce into a real e-commerce solution (seriouslyscuba is on shopify by the way, so I guess you'd have to justify spending money on their high fees to go that route). The design looks good overall, I guess to me, its just that wordpress doesn't make for a good e-commerce solution. I'd hide the Categories block, RSS links, 'Comments are closed' text, i.e. anything that makes it looks like a blog-converted-to-store. Good luck nonetheless.

Where does your friend get all his products? Are they from the same supplier? Is drop-shipping something suppliers normally engage in?

It depends on the industry but there are a lot of suppliers that will drop ship for you. Blind drop shipping is a whole different beast since you might not want to have the supplier advertise his wares or include an invoice for what you paid so be careful.

Same supplier. Just found a business they could work with and pursued the relationship.

Okay, good advice. I am really just bootstrapping here, trying to get up and running and working as soon as possible, for as little as possible... Perhaps I'll switch over to a more serious e-commerce solution once I build up the business a little, with the intention of looking for a better "store-like" theme in the mean time.

Cool. Definitely promote your top-product on the front page so people can add to cart with one click instead of having to navigate over to the store page. If you do want to use a content management system for a storefront, perhaps check out Ubertcart and the fusion theme (is what I think I used). You can see a test site I created at http://c2c.infusedindustries.com - but if you haven't used Drupal before, it can be a timesink to learn.

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