Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Great advice from Craig!

Great advice offered to you from CookieMonster! In fact, I`d urge you to go back and print it out and tape it to your monitor. If you`re looking to keep them on the site longer --- get this right first and foremost!

Cartess

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Website Startup Coach: Step-by-Step Coaching to Help You Build a Profitable Business Online!

Thanks for all the comments everyone. I`m working right now on rewording to try to communicate the advantages of using Art Affair better.

Craig, I have over 3000 components myself and I`m not the worst I`ve heard of. I do beading, painting and fiber art and many times mix them all. It`s very nice to sit down at the computer and see at a glance what I have and how much of it I have instead of digging through boxes and bins. Art Affair also helps with pricing and all sales related functions like invoicing, handling commission works, consignment sales, art fair sales, etc. Believe it or not, this is not fast and easy to do in Excel. Most of my customers, judging by my interactions with them to date, can barely use excel. I have done several conversions for customers from their excel spreadsheets and they were pretty bad.

 

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Deborah Miller
www.artaffairsoftware.com
Software for the business of art!

I agree that it isn`t easily done in Excel, and I meant that when "they don`t want to develop it themselves," they often don`t have the skills.

The issue here is vertical market, and data entry. Here`s my intuition: that you`re both an artist and a computer afficiando, so it makes total sense for you to have a database of your materials. But I`m wondering how many other artists have that interest, want to be organized, and would do the data entry.

You`ve said you have customers, and that`s great. But the main question is how to keep people on your site. I believe we can analyze that in two ways. The first is whether the site and content are compelling, and assuming that someone really is looking for this product.

The second is that someone "wishes" they could better track their materials, then see the product, realize it`s "too complicated" or "too much work" for what they want, and abandon the site. There isn`t a whole lot you can do about that. But the problem is how to know the difference in the two types of viewers.