404039 is the number

There is this business idea that tickles my mind for several years now. It’s the online cloth shop.

The drawback of the idea is that I would need to make a rather substantial initial investment to pile up the stock. Or, maybe not? If I make a deal with a classic brick-and-mortar shop I could even sell their stuff for percentage.
Well, that’s something to think about.

Anyways, before I start contacting my possible future business partners, I wanted to check what kind of shopping cart software is available out there on the market.
That’s when I ran into Ashop Commerce.

Kind of left a good initial impression with their web site and I heard about them before. So, I applied for ten days trial in order to test them and see how that system works. They like to call it a shopping card, but to my mind that system is much more that a shopping card. It is a fully fledged ecommerce software, a web site package with integrated advanced shopping card features.

So, being a designer, I was pleased to see that I can easily modify the templates that they offer in a package. Their template customization system is based mostly on click-drag-drop system that I liked because it was simple but offered a great flexibility at the same time. I was able to change the design of the template completely to fit my idea of nicely designed web shop.

Second benefit was the fact that the maintenance of the products and categories was more than easy to do. Adding a product, together with descriptions, images and inventory tags was really really simple. No help needed there whatsoever.

Third benefit was the variety of support channels should I need one. Video tutorials, documentation, forums, live chat, email support … I felt safe.

Then marketing. The info about the products and categories is integrated into the code in a way that the site is immediately SEO optimized. In addition to that, the Ashop Commerce shopping card system offers newsletter system, affiliate system integration, mass affiliate payment through PayPal, etc. So, this part is well covered too.

All in all, I was pleased with the way it functions. The testing continues, but from what I’ve seen so far I am very close to my next step, finding a brick and mortar clothes company to be my partner.