Build Me a Shop: ShopBuilder.Me

The internet is a wonderful place that allows you to promote your products and services to people in the blink of an eye and achieve overnight success...well...no, not really!

If you are thinking about starting your online commerce venture any time soon, you need to be aware of many hurdles to that overnight success and the pool-side margaritas that come with it.

Deciding to build from scratch or to use a pre-existing framework (OSCommerce, Magento, Prestashop...), creating the right graphics and layout to match your identity, deciding on a payment gateway (local ones like Audi or Netcommerce or international ones like 2CO vs services like Paypal & Skrill), working with a shipping partner for tangible product sales, are just a handful of the many details that the eCommerce devil usually chooses to dwell in.

I was approached, not long ago, by the people from ShopBuilder.me who were pitching their new concept of a turnkey solution that allows anybody to be up and running with their own online shop. Their key feature: a preset platform that connects them to payment gateways and shipping partners.

I was willing to take them up on their request and, in turn, they agreed to let me run loose with my own demo access, asking me to mention the bad before the good, something rarely found in local businesses.

Here are my summarized findings:

The Good

• The registration and account activation process is smooth and flawless.
  
• The theme selection makes it super easy to personalize your shop if you are a non-techie
  
• The Audi Payment gateway module is just a matter of filling some info to connect. No tricky SDK and no endless lines of code.
  
• The Shipping module is also easily configured to connect to Aramex (and other suppliers soon?). Who doesn't hate filling all those zone info etc...
  
• The SEO fields are available to help you in that area.
  
• The excellent after-sales service: The company makes sure to follow-up with a phone call with each person undergoing a trial period to ensure everything is going nicely with them
  
• It's super fast to configure just look at what I did in under an hour with pre-existing graphics I had from my blog and facebook page:  http://chemali.shopbuilder.me/
   

The Bad 
or rather what can be improved to make the site stand-out even more (you'll pardon my penchant for movie references)

• The shop set-up process does not have a clear flow for someone engaging in building their shop for the first time. One needs to be familiar with the glossary of the various sections to really be able to systematically complete all fields and sections needed to end up with a shop. While this was not a particular challenge for me, I suspect the site's target audience is a bit wider than 15 year digital veterans with computer science backgrounds.
   
• The navigation in the back-office is tricky. Clicking on Home will take you to the preview of your shop not to the administration home page. The administration homepage can only be accessed from the breadcrumbs menu on top. The left menu does not offer a link back to that initial page.
   
• Social media integration needs to be more in-depth. It is important for some who want to make it easier for their customers on various channels to log-in using those credentials.
   
• No customization of CSS (at least) for the available templates. Adding this possibility will catapult the site further.

The Ugly
or what makes the experience less pleasant without taking away from the functionality and concept.

• In all honesty, I was initially put off by the user interface. In a time and age where Microsoft spearheaded flat design, and Google is overhauling the majority of its interfaces with the slick Material Design guidelines www.shopbuilder.me failed to deliver in design what it offered in features. With a dominating light grey background adjacent to white areas the entire design just felt like a cloudy autumn day.
   
• Other design related issues include the lack of definition is obvious in the bottom grid whose top separator is overlapped by the omnipresent 14-day trial promo box on the right hand side...
  
  
  
• The current template selections is not very rich and require a good deal of additional tweaks.
   
• Some notifications in the back-office overlap with page design and turn in into a gooey mess
  
  
  
  

Final Thoughts

Shop Builder is a valiant effort to bring eCommerce to the masses in the most transparent way. By eliminating the tricky parts of setting up your own shop they promise the wannabe merchant a fast lane road into the market.

I am not sure how much large businesses would want to resort to using the site in its current form for selling their products, as I imagine them more concerned about having their own branding. Perhaps this is an idea for the founders to offer premium customization for large client.

However, if you are a small business, and are not ready to invest half of your capital into building an eCommerce site and doing all the leg work that comes with that, then you have just stumbled into the right solution for you.

Shop Builder might just need a bit of tweaking and dressing up but it's on the right track towards becoming a killer product for your eCommerce needs.

The Rise and Fall of MonotStreet.com

The Backdrop
 
The year was 2002, I was four years into my career as a web developer and I saw everything in HTML markup and Hexadecimal color codes.
I had springboarded myself from working at OGERO the local state-run fixed-telephony operator towards Cellis, France Telecom's burgeoning mobile operator in Lebanon (currently rebranded as Alfa). I was the first web developer to join the company.
Although my job offered me the chance to work on various challenging projects, it was just not enough to satisfy my hunger for more challenges. On top of that, my employment conditions had taken an unexpected turn to the worse and this incited me towards wanting to build something independently from my day job. An idea that would potentially allow me to run my own show without having to report to individuals who were, at the time, much less informed about the business of the web.

The Idea

At that same period, a tiny street in Beirut was becoming the hottest spot in town, where all the club, pubs and cafes were opening up. Monot Street was where nightlife happened. Unlike myself, Chris, a childhood friend of mine was an aficionado of the Beirut night life and It only took us one discussion and the idea was born: www.monotstreet.com a website/portal dedicated to Beirut's nightlife.
We were going to go all digital on a city that still lacked DSL internet, in a country where in many houses echoed still the distinct whizzing of the dial-up modem handshake; but we did not care.
Chris would be in charge of the field operations and I would handle all the digital aspects of the projects.

The Rise

In March 2003 we went live with a unique nightlife-inspired branding and full arsenal of gimmicks:

Our nightlife portal was armed to the teeth and ready to take on the scene with features such as:

• An exhaustive Directory of all the hot spots with detailed listing on venue style, music genres, opening hours, price range, location and popularity
   
• A regularly updated list of all the major Events happening in the street
   
• A news section ironically called @Monot way before twitter came into existence
   
• The Party Planner service which would suggest venues based on criteria of date, price, style and number of attendees provided by the user
   
• The Music section contained a directory of DJs who worked in Monot along with a weekly top 10 of the tracks being requested the most by clients of the establishments on the street.
   
• The Photos section contained picture galleries of people enjoying their outing in Monot - For the geeks reading this, I had implemented a JavaScript hack that worked like AJAX (the term was not coined yet) for viewing pictures without reloading the entire page and even added server-side code that would watermark the images on the fly -
   
• The interactive section contained a Chat Room and a Forum where people would be welcome to interact and exchange ideas. It also contained a poll that was intended to help us enhance our features further. At one point we had also partnered with Vibe Lebanon, the first Lebanese online radio.
    
• Daily Horoscopes were provided and updated automatically through a provider in Italy.

Chris at our stand during
Fete de La Musique 2003

Upon launching the website we quickly gained momentum in spite of a competitor launching shortly afterwards. Although they were quite dynamic on the field, they were outclassed by our website build quality and our premium domain names (monotstreet.com & ruemonot.com). We made sure to cover all events such as Fete De La Musique and became familiar with the Monot scene. All we needed was to start bringing in some revenue.

The Fall 

We had set out to ensure revenue by proposing premium listing subscriptions to venue owners. The premium listing offered them several perks such as increased coverage, prime location in the directory and on the homepage, newsletter and forum mentions and preferential recommendation in the Party Planner section.

We soon realized this was not going to work, as only a handful of locations opted for premium. We had omitted to analyze the profile of the average venue owner and their understanding of what we were proposing. Many of the owners had converted into this business from non-related activities and did not really understand why they would pay a subscription fee (even a small one), since, anyway, their shops were always full and money was pouring-in like crazy.

We fell back onto plan B. It involved eliminating the premium subscription fee and relying instead on making the site popular enough, so that we could sell on-site advertising and ensure some form of revenue from all the efforts being poured into this venture. This approach soon proved itself also insufficient. Neither online nor offline we could build enough momentum nor find a market for advertisers. Club owners were un-cooperative even when we gave freebies and would not help us promote the site even if this would eventually help them highlight their own businesses.
We hung on to the project for several months before eventually giving up and calling it quits effectively abandoning all efforts in maintaining the website.

Afterthought

Writing this post 11 years after MonotStreet.com went live has given me some perspective (on top of a lot of market experience). At the time, we had attributed our failure to the negative and dismissive attitude that often characterizes the Lebanese society especially when dealing with club owners. We also wondered if we needed to have built some more features into the website. We didn't!
As far as blaming other stakeholders for not being able to push the service effectively, we were only half-right. Yes, we had trouble dealing with some people, but we also had trouble marketing to the end user. Getting the word out, familiarizing people with the portal, making it a daily go-to online destination was simply not possible at the time.
A deadly mix of weak internet, market penetration, slow connection speeds and mobile internet limited to WAP had dealt the coup de grace to our project in 2004.

Today, many similar concepts exist and thrive. They do because the ecosystem has changed, a new accelerator has been added to the formula. This new ingredient that has spiced up the mix in a way that allows to compensate for many of the issues that we could not surmount 11 years ago is called (yes you guessed it):  Social Media Marketing.

The existence of Facebook, Twitter and various other channels has made users spend more online time and familiarized them with the power and convenience of digital. Website owners can now run effective targeted ads to maximize awareness on their product and can push their content into these channels for optimized viral reach.

In a world of fast changing technological landscape, we are often warned that we need to anticipate things and move fast enough, yet somehow, moving too fast and anticipating too early was exactly what caused the downfall of MonotStreet.com. The End.