” Anyone can write a book. Anyone can publish a book. It takes a genius to sell a book “
-Alfred Knopf
Today I read an email from my dad about a discussion I opened on how happy he was with his site. I was never 100% satisfied with it.
My dad is a print man. He didn’t like the font I picked or the punctuation mistakes.I just knew it was still slightly confused and had too much repeat content. I also knew that as an online shopping experience it didn’t cut it. But I didn’t feel I had the right to change the content of the site.Sure, I took new photos and connected a lot of them to LightBox. I made the site look more up to date. I changed it from static HTML pages to PHP…but lack of bells and whistles weren’t the problem. The site’s goal is to sell books. We don’t make it easy to sell books from the Web site. Game Over.
This is entirely due to the fact that on his host it wasn’t possible to have a mySQL database connection until a few weeks ago. This cut us out from using ZenCart or PHPShop or Cubecart. So we made due with the host’s store building program (Shopsite Starter) that only allows you to have 15 products for sale in the store at any time. Talk about limiting!
My dad has more than 50 titles for sale. I tried to convince him to upgrade to the second level of Shopsite which cost the same as what one month of hosting costs-doubling his costs. He balked. I don’t blame him. For what he pays he could have (mt) Media Temple’s awesome service. But switching an entire site is a big job as everyone knows. I am seriously going to suggest it, however.
Hosting has advanced and the days of hosts being able to charge business prices while providing totally crap service are pretty much gone.
Until we can sell every single title from the same shopping cart service, the site will remain confusing and confused. I mean, it is hard enough these days to sell books. Harder even still to sell obscure niche literature. Which is why we have to provide the clearest, easiest shopping experience to my dad’s customers.
Have any advice? Is it better to offer only 15 books for sale (but then what to do with the 40 other books on the site, just not even show them at all?). Should I chuck Shopsite and Mercantec and only use Paypal? I’d love to steer clear of Paypal for the time being.
Should I make the jump to (mt)?