Autobot vs. Decepticons: Create An Ecommerce Webstore in 5 Minutes

Written by John Comments
Last Updated July 20, 2009

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BEWARE of the DECEPTICONS! So what is a "Decepticon" you ask? Well, the top grossing move in America so far this summer is Transformers 2. The Decepticons are the villainous robots in the fictional universe of the Transformers. These villain take many forms and think very little of humans.

On the other side are the good Autobots who are opposed to the evil Decepticons. Autobots are usually out numbered by the Decepticons, but they have support of the humans.

So that was fun, which transformer are you? I always was an Autobot when I was a kid, LMAO. I liked the good guy sides. But mostly because they had the cooler vehicles to me, so I liked playing on their side.

OK…back to work, right? I dig the term Decepticons which comes from two words Deception and Con.

Deception – is the act of convincing another to believe information that is not true.
A Con - is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence.

So I think a Decepticon is a GREAT way to describe the two enemies of success that can permeate around business owners. You must think about your business as a living entity and determine if what you READ, LISTEN TO and HEAR is coming as an Autobot or a Decepticon.

They are out there constantly battling for your business everyday. It is up to you to make the determination, because what might be a "friend" to one could be an enemy to you and destroy what you are working to achieve.

Here are two of my pet peeves from the world of Decepticons….

#1) WordPress Installation "Developers" - I called them snake-oil salesman cause they have preyed upon people with little money. Using the promise of GREAT THINGS, if only you let them "develop you a blog" using WordPress which they install in 5 minutes and laugh all the way to the bank with hundreds of your hard earned dollars.

#2) Over HYPED So Called "Ebay WannaBe’s" – Sales platforms/marketplaces that drive ZERO traffic! You do ALL THE WORK to drive the traffic and they (the marketplace) take all the BRANDING! You are left with very little sales, a ton of marketing work to do, and nothing to show for it, but frustration.

So WHY OH WHY would one choose to do that when you could have a Wordpress installation with ecommerce that YOU OWN in about 5 minutes up and running?!? Maybe you just did not know how easy it really is? OK, this should show you.

Do yourself a favor and invest some time and effort in your business. Start to create your own brand and payment channel thanks to the WordPress e-Commerce Plug-In it is relatively easy really. You can do this man, you really can!!!

Plus there are very active forums for both the ecommerce plug in as well as the ever helpful WordPress forums

Look at some of these great example stores created with this FREE plug in!

http://www.seekanddestroyclothing.com/

http://tabletalk.com/index.php

http://www.imagecubes.com/

PhilipB

Thank You for this very good Information

Rob Metras

Very useful and informative post. Look forward to more fom you.

Cliff Aliperti

Vince, there's an easy Disqus integration with Storytlr, which I believe aims the entire experience towards the web 4.0 conversation you're speaking of.

fitzcharming

Hi John - Love these videos but your message may be a teeny bit misleading. If you scroll to the bottom of the 3 sites you gave as examples, 2 out of the 3 were "designed" by a company. I'd wager the third one was too, they just haven't included the designers name. While setting up an e-commerce website is pretty straightforward (I did one on the zen cart open source free platform), in my opinion the graphics and design are worth paying for as long as one does the research. I tried to teach myself graphic design and I'm hopeless. And thanks to Cliff for the tip on Storytlr, gonna have to check into that. - Wanda

John

Great catch Wanda!!! I did not see that. Yeah, some more "developers" LMAO. Although these are more designers, and I love a good web designer ;-) Thanks so much for pointing that out to us.

John

vince jelenic

Hey Cliff, Storytlr is a life-feed.

Stop playing with the software, and start playing with your life -- that's the aim.

Software is supposed to be easy to "get", setup, and forget. The activity should be in the life behind it.

Keep a varied and storied life going, and storytlr will now fill itself.

While I realize it has limits, and will need some babysitting now and again... the idea is brilliant.

Now, go one step farther, imagine storytlr being comprised of multiple users lives intertwined, where you could follow a conversation among various users, (friends) for instance. that's web 4.0. when ideas can be dispersed, yet filtered together and mashed into a momentary life experience.
(Ok, looks like we've caught up to 1994 now :-)

Now, imagine selling into that galaxy.

cheers.

Cliff Aliperti

Hey Vince, I found that one when I was looking into Aplifeeder, which turned out to be a bit beyond my technical skills. When Amplifeeder was discussed elsewhere though SweetCron and Storytlr kept coming up and since all I needed to play with Storytlr was an online account I had to try it.

It's so easy my only disappointment is that after I work on it a couple more hours I'm not going to really have anything more to play with!

Cliff

John

I don't really dig the 1&1 estores. I have had 1&1 for our provider for years, but the estore is not that robust. If you have NO experience at all, check out the story here about Buy It Sell If from our guest blogger Cliff...

http://3rdpoblogs.com/colderice/2009/03/22/buyi...

John

Lisa

So John, are you recommending this wordpress plugin to build a small e-store? It's really that easy? Or would it better to go with something like 1%1estores, if you've never built a webstore?

vince jelenic

great stuff, Cliff. just signed on, awaiting "confirmation email" chewingnailsagainlovethesethings.

Back in 1994, storytelling was what I envisioned the future web to be, and actually designed a product called SimulNet as training for kids. They got it quite easily back then. I like the concept, can't wait to see more of it.

Could be a really good tool to build TRUST in a seller, I would think, something lacking when ebay and venues break up. It's actually Web 4.0 stuff.

cheers

Cliff Aliperti

Hey Vince,

I might have found a home for it "all" - I'd previously been pointing people to my Google Profile to show all my stuff, but have you ever heard of storytlr.com? I found it this weekend and thought it'd be a lot longer before I was showing it off, but it's really pulling together fast. Here's mine.

It's free, it's hosted, and it's very easy to work with. I opted to have the page default to all of my blog posts, but you can see I have a Store stream there (just eBay so far, but I could easily add more), as well as a social stream (mainly my twitter right now).

Like I said, I really just found this Saturday and have done this much with it so far. You can also post directly to your storytlr site. I'm finding it to be like tumblr on steroids right now, loving that I can import my Stores RSS!

Thanks, Cliff

vince jelenic

John, everyplaceIsell is great, but customer has to jump around web.

I'm thinking more along lines of what Cliff did with VintageMeld.com or what we did at greenspot.ning.com.

In our case, we have tab menus which show a page with our bonanzle stuff, another for ebay stuff, and links to categorized searches on google-base of our products.

All neatly within our own HOME site. User only leaves if they click on an item, and then, only in new window.

Cheers
& keep on shocking and rocking.

vince jelenic

Hey, John, on the money, as usual.
A little harsh on the "snake-oil", but almost warranted.

Now, if you add a two minute tutorial on how to use the rss-include plugins in wordpress to bring in ebay, bonanzle, etsy, and our other online stores and feeds into same blog, you could label this posting how to get an e-commerce HOME web-store up in 7 minutes. :-)

It's nice to have a home to go back to at end of day, where all your stuff is neatly gathered in one spot, I think.

John

Well Vince, you know I do have a "shock jock" persona sometimes...LMAO. I dunno, just my nature I guess, I am working on it ;-). I like that thought of doing that. There is also this thing that Ina from Auctionbytes has called Every Place I Sell that does that for you somewhat. You could add that to your blog as a "quick and dirty solution". Also I will look around for an answer to what you are looking for. It really is a great thought sir.

Thanks, John

Tom

That's all well and good.. if you have products to sell. How about a plugin (and a tutorial from you) on affiliate site sales via a WordPress site??

Tom