SELLING ONLINE (like signarama)

[GB2]

Regardless of everyone's philosophizing, I think your basic idea of pooling your resources to develop something bigger and better than one shop can manage is a great idea. This mutual cooperation is something that should happen more often and is a great benefit of a site like this.

 

[OADesign]

Has anyone thought about selling their product online like signarama ? I have been looking into building a ecommerce site but have bumped into the initial high cost.

I was wondering if other professionals have thought this out as well.


There is signsite and others , but those are very boring, bland looking & expensive to operate. I wanted a site that really popped !!

Just an FYI. The franchise site your looking at IS a product by SignSite. It is just a hacked version of Magento eCommerce.

One way would be to group our monies together, my thought was if the cost is 25K to have a signarama site built, and I could find 5 sign companies, that would cost everyone 5K each. The site would be identical other than each of us would have our company name, info, phone, emails, the ability to change pricing, etc. We could even customize with our own sign examples. If 10 sign companies were interested it would drop the price to 2,500 ea.


That would be a one time cost .


You would still have hosting, domain, shopping cart fees etc. But you have that with any ecommerce site. This would be a very high end site.


I would send the project to www.guru.com as their are hundreds of webdesigners on that site. And I am sure we would get plenty of bids to choose from.

let me know if any of you would be interested and your concerns
norman hi-image1@cox.net

And the scenario you describe is pretty much how they are distributing the cost to put the system in place. And not many of the franchisees were happy about it in the begining (and still not happy). It is a high premium to pay for many of the franchise stores struggling to even keep the doors open. Of those, only a very small percent of them are even breaking even with the cost of operating the online shop. But the franchisor says its only another tool to bring customers in that they might not have secured other wise. Not logical IMO but MO is irrelevant. Funny thing is the SignSite sells these systems AND operates many independent sites. So basically, you know that wholesaler that you hate that sells to you and your customer effectively becoming the competition, thats them.

And if you pursure this, with SignSite or another contractor, I hope you have a plan going forward. Just because you build it, does not mean they will come. The SignSite guys have invested a lot of time and money into their SEO efforts to grab the local markets (probably even YOUR local market) can you compete?

 

[normana61]

thanks to all !!!

thanks for all your responses

norman

 

[Stagecraft]

I'm right in the middle of building an e-commerce site.
I will be selling vinyl graphics online as an option to a more expensive product that we sell.
Its a niche market targeting the high-end yacht trade.
Anyways...If you're reasonably competent using Coreldraw, Illustrator or virtually any other draw program theres a very easy, affordable way to build a great looking site.
Check out www.coffeecup.com and look for a program called Visual Site Designer.
Its a wysiwyg program designed for those of us that don't write code.
You can download a free trial for a test drive, it can be used as a stand-alone or you can add components to it as you grow.
Theres also a dedicated forum thats almost as good as this one.
This is one of my own sites for personal use www.grandbanks42.com
I'm not affiliated with Coffeecup, just a big fan. - Boyd

 

[OADesign]

There are some franchise store members here. I would like to hear their thoughts on this.

 

[Bigdawg]

Been coding with coffeecup since they started in 96. Great programs... but i think what the OP is looking for is an online site the consumer can design their sign within the site. Coffeecup has no products that I know of to do that (but I could be wrong).

 

[Stagecraft]

Stacy, the site that I'm currently assembling incorporates just what you're describing.
Its a downloadable Flash program at http://www.developflash.com/
Theres a free trial available and to purchase it starts at around $400.
It wasn't as straightforward an installation as a moron like me would like, fortunately there were volunteers on the CoffeCup forum to talk me through the process.
See this post http://www.coffeecup.com/forums/designer/font-selection-software/ - Boyd

 

[Locals Find!]

Yes, almost anything is possible provided you have the money and time.

this method is better suited for customizing of existing graphics. think of it like this: a sign for a house for sale. you can change the picture, change the phone number, change the agent, but the placement is unchangeable.

for this, all you would need is a blank plate, the font, and a placeholder image location, the rest would be placed in via your poison of choice (xml seems logical for something like this)

this is then converted to PDF and sent to the printer for processing.

I use zeta prints for doing just this its cheap. You only pay when an order is completed. No upfront fees. You setup your files in Corel 12 or higher and load them up. Was fairly easy to setup. I set mine up in about 4 hours on a saturday for a few Real Estate offices. I am currently running 4 stores of their system.

I get the files exported back to me in the native corel. If anyone wants to take a look at what I did let me know. I will be happy to share my experience.

 

[VinylLabs.com]

I use zeta prints for doing just this its cheap. You only pay when an order is completed. No upfront fees. You setup your files in Corel 12 or higher and load them up. Was fairly easy to setup. I set mine up in about 4 hours on a saturday for a few Real Estate offices. I am currently running 4 stores of their system.

I get the files exported back to me in the native corel. If anyone wants to take a look at what I did let me know. I will be happy to share my experience.

I would like to see yours.

I read through their documentation and this is what I got from it:

when a client requests a mockup that uses their engine, you will be charged approx. 1$. (I dont remember the cost might havce been lower) but that was when a client adds their own text, and hits "preview" they talso charge you when the client hits "submit" on a finalised order. but I will look into it.

 

[VinylLabs.com]

never mind.

i looked it up, I think I wasn't reading straight.

it's 1 cent per preview and 1.70$ per delivered product.