This is part two of a 3 part blog on one airbrush studios process of transitioning from a Brick and Mortar store to doing Online sales and Events. We will talk about what it was like closing our Retail location after almost 30 years of Brick and Mortar stores and the challenges that came along with learning how to navigate the world of having an online business and combining it with an events business…neither of which require an actual public location.
In this post we will discuss the Online portion of the Transition….lets get started…
So…..we’ve closed our retail location, we built a website with online store and we have started getting online orders. So what was the process like getting here?
First things first…building the website. How did we choose what website builder to use? We looked into Godaddy.com, wix.com, squarespace.com, and even hiring a web designer. We settled on Squarespace.com. Not for any one particular reason, we just felt it was easy enough for all of us to be able to grasp and from a business side it was in a price range that I was comfortable with.
Our old site was built back in 2000 with the program called Dreamweaver2 …anybody who knows anything about websites is probably rolling over on the floor laughing that we had a website for almost 20 years built with Dreamweaver2… and never updated it…lol….it is kinda funny… and sad….lol
Our Website host is Networksolutions and we have always been happy with them but we didn’t like their choices of website templates. When doing a website, you have to have your domain(website name) hosted by someone….in simple terms its the company holding all your website information/files etc…. so the first thing we had to do was decide if we still wanted to have them host or just move everything over to squarespace.com Without going into a lot of technical detail(I don’t think I could explain it even if i had to…lol) we decided to have Networksolutions “point” everything in Squarespaces direction because NS didn’t have templates that we liked and we liked the look of Squarespace.com better. NS still handles our email and domain but we build everything in squarespace.com
Next we had to pick a template from Squarespaces’ inventory and proceed to build the site. I believe that Building the site is rather easy, What I think a lot of people will have trouble with is “Content”. As I said in our blog on Advertising…printed promotional sand social media you need to take pictures of EVERYTHING!…not just because of social media but a website is a prime example of needing pictures for the content. How can you have a website if you don’t have pictures of the things you sell? So, start taking pictures of ALL your displays, your store, your artists because you WILL need them eventually. Keep this in mind…EVERYTHING….that is on a website needs to be “built” or “made” in some form. So look at our website for example… anythingairbrushed.com everything you see…all the pictures, all the collages all the fancy titles all had to be built. You can’t just buy “clipart” for your website. You have to fill it with your own content. If that content does not exist then you have to make it yourself. This is the most overwhelming an time consuming part of building a website. For us, we pretty much build/edit everything with photoshop.
So, Now you have a website, and pictures of the stuff you want to put on there. All that is left is getting started on putting it all together. As far as Squarespace is concerned it was all pretty easy…overwhelming…YES…but all in all it was pretty easy. They have good help pages and their online chat help is pretty fast. Any problems I had were pretty easy to figure out.
I’m not going into a step by step of how we built our site because thats what the website builders support team is for. I will go into the few problems we encountered on making an airbrush shop work online.
The number one problem we had figuring out was “Custom Artwork”. How can someone pay for something over the internet that isn’t on our website? Remember, an airbrush artist can paint ANYTHING!!!!….but it is impossible to have a website that has EVERYTHING on it. How can a customer pay for a cartoon picture of their dog chasing a cat?….there is no button for ”cartoon dogs chasing cats”…lol…you can’t possibly have a button for everything your customers are going to throw at you.
It’s easy to have a category of “cheerleading designs” with 20 or so designs on it and all a customer has to do is click on the design they want and proceed to make a couple other choices and answer a question or two then proceed to check out. But what about all those Crazy ideas our customers come up with that you can’t even remotely predict? How can you put something on a website that only exists in a customers mind?
So we had to figure out a way for customers to be able to pay for a blank item as well as for “custom artwork” that doesn’t even exist.
What we came up with is having a separate section that has all our blank products. All a customer has to do is click on the “blank items” icon, choose what they want and then ”add to cart”. Just like you would buy from any other website.
But how do they pay the artwork price for that “dog chasing the cat cartoon picture” that they want on the “blank item” they just chose?
Usually our inquiries come via email or phone call. It is during these conversations that they tell us what they want or email us pictures of what they want and we give them the price that they need to choose in order to pay online.
What we came up with was a section whose “inventory” was nothing but PRICES. So when a customer clicks on the “Custom artwork” icon they are taken to a page that has prices from $2.00 to $1000.00.
All they have to do is click on the price or the combination of prices that add up to the price we gave them via email or on the phone….then press add to cart. Once they press “add to cart” a window will pop up where they get to explain the order and then they proceed to check out.
Again…. you can’t put everything you can possibly paint on a website but you can put a limited number of prices that add up to ANY price. This was the easiest way we could come up with to solve the problem of paying online for custom artwork.
Now you might ask….why go through all of this?….why not just have them pay over the phone with a credit card?. The simple answer is that some people just do not like giving their credit card information over the phone. They are not as comfortable doing it with a small “unknown” business as opposed to a well know corporation. They don’t like the idea that their credit card information could be laying around on a scrap piece of paper in someones “Home” office. Lets face it….their misgivings have a good point… if you work from home you will probably be answering the phone in your PJ’s half the time and writing the order down on the closest piece of scrap paper you can find…lol
So the bottom line is we had to come up with a way people could pay ANY price online. This was the easiest way we could figure out how to do it using Squarespace.com That is not to say that some other website builders have ways of doing this or even that there is a way to do it in squarespace and we haven’t figured it out yet.…i just have not found a website where I can make up something out of my head, type it in and BAM!….a price just magically appears. Every site seems to work with the “choose and click” method. Meaning there has to be something there for a customer to “click” on in order for it to apply to what they are buying. With our method the customer has an icon of a “price” to click on….instead of a picture of a toaster…lol
This is what we have come up with. If any of you reading this has already come up with a better idea of doing this without having to transition from squarespace.com….we would love to hear about it.
I believe that this is also one reason why airbrush artists will always be around, because we can still do things that computers can not. However, it is also a reason why the airbrush business will not be so easy to transition completely online…..there will always be a need to talk with the artist whether that be via e-mail or on the phone.
The next issue we came across is one we still have not been able to solve completely. The issue of a customer wanting something “Same Day”. For us, if they place a basic order by 2:00pm it can realistically ship the same day. However we have discovered that even this is not fast enough in todays society.
The shipping section of the website seemed to be the most logical area to deal with getting an item to the customer. When a customer comes to the shipping portion of the check out process, we have 3 basic options. We go into a little more detail as to how we came up with these in the third portion of this blog post Location, Location, Location but for now the three options are.
1.) USPS Priority Mail(2day)….(Cincinnati Local 1 day) this is $6.00 plus $1.00 for each item. Now, the reason we have it this way is because the standard price for the Post Office Flat rate envelope Priority Mail is $7.35 but it has weight and size limits. So technically when a customer orders just one shirt we are losing ¢.35 because the shipping comes up to $6.00+$1.00=$7.00 …however each shirt in the order over one shirt and we are making a little extra.
Now, with squarespace you can go through the trouble of adding in all the weights and dimensions so that at check out its already calculated for as many different shipping vendors that you want to offer(FedEx, UPS etc….) However in order to do this you have to have all the weights of your different items already figured out in order to plug these numbers in….AND you have to do this for EVERY item. That was just waaaaayyy to much work…lol… so we came up with the above way just to keep it simple for us. Yes, we lose a little on all the individual orders but on bigger orders we gain it back.
2.) The next option is “Personal Pickup”(call before selecting this option) This we charge a flat rate of $10.00. This is what we added in hopes of solving the “same day” issue. This entails us meeting the customers at a specific location at a specific time. In our case we choose to meet people at the main entrance of the old mall we used to be in. It’s very close to where most of the artists live. We usually do a 10:30 am and a 3:00pm pick up/drop off time if one of us is available. This works because realistically a person can place the order in the morning and probably get it at 3:00pm….otherwise the customer will have to choose to have it mailed.
3.) The Third option is “Own item pickup and delivery”(for people using their own items) This we charge $20.00 which just like it sounds …we have to set up a time to get the item from them and another time to get it back to them.
These are the 3 options we have available for customers. Any other option such as overnight, or a different shipping method would have to be worked out over the phone or via email. But guess what?….any additional price can still be paid online by the customer by just telling them to pay the additional price via the “custom artwork” page….so again solving the problem of paying online for ANY out of the ordinary request.
So, we still get people wanting things “same day” and we have LOST a lot of orders because we can’t always do same day. So this seems to be one of the issues that will only be solved by still having a public location. We had a little help with this issue during the Summer when we were able to have them place the order online or over the phone and then pick up at our Waterpark location….but even this met with quite a bit of opposition. We also did a seasonal location in another Mall this year(2019) and they were able to do “in store pickup”
The next issue was people wanting to pay cash. Yes, believe it or not, some people still only pay cash. This is also an on going issue. Since a lot of airbrush customers are of a slightly lower income level, these people do not have bank accounts, therefore they have no way for them to do things online. We are not about to take an order over the phone, do the order, and set up a time to meet them so they can pay for it with cash…..in hopes that they actually show up. I guarantee if you start doing this you will be stuck with many shirts that are unpaid for. The only logical way is to meet them first , get paid, go back and do the order and meet them again to drop off….this is a personal choice but I wouldn’t do it with out a service charge of some sort.
These are a few of the issues we have discovered so far and if you have been paying attention you can see that these are more “social issues” Meaning, as a society we have become so used to being able to get ANYTHING we want right away. That just doesn’t work 100% of the time for custom airbrushed artwork.
However, let me point out, that online can work very well for the standard airbrush t-shirt shop that does NOTHING but their own standard designs. Just like the standard design section of our website… https://www.anythingairbrushed.com/shop … where you can order any of our designs with minimal changes and get it within two days. This works GREAT!….but custom artwork, which is what most airbrush studios do… and… is what we have grown the reputation for being here in the Cincinnati area, find it a little more difficult.
So keep these things in mind when deciding to do an online store. Either be ready to accept the fact that you will still have to deal with customers on the phone or via e-mail or decide from the beginning that you will do NOTHING except the designs you offer and customers can only order online.
So that gives you a little idea of the Online portion of transitioning from a brick and mortar store. As always feel free to comment and ask questions.
Be sure to check out the other two portions of this blog
Transitioning from a Brick and Mortar store