Why am I attempting to start a business from scratch and why am I focusing on e-commerce of all things? Good questions. Glad you asked…
In the last year I’ve found a new passion, e-commerce. I have worked in web development for many years but from 2002 through 2009 I had almost no projects that dealt with business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce websites. Finally, last year when I moved into my current position I had the ability to set some direction at the company and decided that e-commerce was an area where we had had success in the past and I thought we could build new experience around it in the present. Little did I know at the time that I would become so personally interested in it. Needless to say a year later and I am more interested in it than ever.
Over that time I’ve come to read a lot about e-commerce trends, technologies, and companies. I also started listening to the E-Commerce Developer and Practice E-Commerce podcasts and found that there are a lot of people like myself that either had a goal to create an e-commerce company or just happened to fall into in and really enjoy it. Not only that, some of these people had no experience in starting a business or web development when they got started and have still become quite successful. Those testimonials have encouraged me to try my hand at it.
As for starting from scratch, well, that’s the best way to learn in my opinion. Sure, I could go out and get a Prostores account, throw up some products, and see what happens (and that may still be the end result), but I wanted to combine my interest in e-commerce with my interest and expertise in web development to see how far I can go in building my own e-commerce platform. Another theme that I heard during multiple podcasts was around people who decided that the carts and platforms on the market didn’t suit their needs and so they went out and built their own. What better way to have complete knowledge of a platform and complete control over its features than to build it yourself?!
Time will tell whether I am biting off more than I can chew but that’s what this whole experiment is about: experimenting, learning, revising, pursuing. Regardless of the result I will be proud of the attempt.
