Jesse L. Palmer

The GreenTech Shop database is completed

I have finished creating the new The GreenTech Shop database. I created it in MySQL and I used PHPMyAdmin as my front-end. The above screen shot is the table structure on one of my tables. This new database will replace most of my current need for the out-of-the-box Yahoo! Store (or Yahoo! Merchant Solutions if you want to be fancy) database that I use. Using a custom database should improve my site in the following ways:

• Allows me to store data that the Yahoo! Store database wouldn’t, such as, Green Labels my products may use and my product’s Green Properities.
• Allows me to use PHP with a Yahoo! Store. I’ve been using the Yahoo! Store coding tags and templates for my current site and I think that this is very time consuming. I think it would be easier to create own template using PHP.

My next step is to go ahead and redesign my the template that I mentioned above. The orginal plan was to create the database, then create a control panel that would access that data. Now I think it may be better to go ahead with the redesign and I can wait on the custom control panel. For the time being the PHPMyAdmin interface should be an adequate front-end to manage data.

Having multiple online storefronts is a good thing

When I first started The GreenTech Shop I wanted to test sell on eBay before building my website. After a couple of months I realized that it would be a good idea to go ahead and keep the eBay storefront. I figured that having a storefront on eBay would be beneficial in that I could use the storefront to drive traffic to thegreentechshop.com, have another source of revenue, and to gauge interest in products that I sell. Plus it just made sense to tap into such a huge customer base, since eBay is one of the largest marketplaces in the world.

Afterwards, I decided to expand my business onto Amazon for the same reasons that I sold products on eBay. So currently, I have three storefronts that I use, eBay Amazon, and thegreentechshop.com.

In the last couple of months I have been slowly concentrating more on my website than outside storefronts. The great part about selling on your own website is that it is so much easier to process orders. You don’t have to comply with any eBay or Amazon methods or protocols. Plus you get to keep a bigger portion of the revenue. The bad part is that you are pretty much on your own in terms of marketing and developing a brand can be a slow process.

In my opinion, the strategy that makes the most sense is to have a mixture of selling on your website and to have storefronts on popular marketplaces. That way you can leverage the power of their established brands to help you build your own brand.

Kudos to Fulfillment by Amazon

I’ve been using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) for a couple of months (including the busy Christmas season) now and I’ve been pretty impressed with the results. The system is easy to use and is quick to set up. Basically, you create a listing, assign fulfillment to Amazon instead of yourself, create a shipment, and then sent it to Amazon. From then on all you are doing is managing the listing and sending more inventory if needed.

Of course there are fees involved, but it works for me and makes my life a lot easier. You also miss a branding opportunity, because as far as I know you can’t send them your custom boxes or packaging. I’m willing to trade that the branding opportunity for the convenience for the time being though.

If you have an e-commerce company I would definitely suggest taking a look at this service.

The GreenTech Shop gets a little more pub

Here is a big thank you to Beth Hodgson at Global News who mentioned The GreenTech Shop in a blog post this past week. The blog post The GreenTech Shop was mentioned in is titled “Five great, green online shops to visit on Cyber Monday” and I just happen to agree with her

The GreenTech Shop Gets Some Pub

The GreenTech Shop got a mention in the Quarterly Newsletter for the Environmental and Energy Study Institute this week. It’s pretty short, but its a start. If your interested in joining the Environmental and Energy Study Institute Newsletter please visit their site at eesi.org and enter your email address in the box toward the upper left hand corner of the page. And if you happen to be interested in joining The GreenTech Shop Newsletter, you can do so at thegreentechshop.com and enter you email address in the box at the lower left hand corner.

Upgrading The GreenTech Shop Database

I’m in the process of upgrading The GreenTech Shop database. Currently, The GreenTech Shop has been using a Yahoo! E-Commerce back-end (I’m not sure what RDBMS they use), but I just don’t think that its flexible enough for to create a dynamic site that I envision.

For example, I want the radios section page to show all of the radios we have for sale in our database dynamically. So I’m going to have to write a simple query to select all radios where the product category equals radio. Simple enough right? The problem is that you can’t access the Yahoo! E-Commerce back-end using SQL as far as I know. So I’m in the process of creating my own database which I can access using PHP. This will make the website more dynamic and I can start deleting all of those static pages that are pretty tedious to maintain.

I believe that you can do something like this using Yahoo’s templates, but I’m not interested in learning their system. For whatever reason, probably prior experience, I still think that Yahoo’s template will be flexible enough. At this point I rather build my own custom solution.

Help The GreenTech Shop get a new look

I am looking for someone to redesign The GreenTech Shop. I mentioned in my last post that I have started doing web design work again, but I think for this particular redesign I’m going to look for someone who has more experience and brings an outside perspective to the table. Preferable the person is someone who has experience with e-commerce and “green” sites. Please contact me at jesse@thegreentechshop.com if you (or if you know someone) are interested in adding a eco-friendly, consumer electronics website to your portfolio or if you have any questions. For this project all I’m looking for is the design, I can do the actual coding myself. Thanks.