Hey HN, I finally got around to figuring out how to implement Tim Ferris's muse concept for myself. I'd like to get your feedback on how to make it better.<p>Address is http://miraclefruitstand.net/<p>Let me make this clear: I'll be grateful if you just throw some advice my way on how to take this to the next level. Don't feel obliged to purchase anything; my desire is not to spam (but I will say I enjoy the products myself).<p>For the curious lurker, here's what I did:<p>>Contacted the warehouse rep.<p>>Arranged to be a distributor for the product (which isn't hard - basically just reviewing their policies and getting familiar with how they operate).<p>>Found out their dropshipping rates; calculated the margins for myself.<p>>Registered the domain with NearlyFreeSpeech.net - saved a bunch - 11 or 12 bucks.<p>>Built the site with wordpress and customized it in a day. Theme, plugins, etc...<p>>Plugged it in to paypal.<p>>Tested out the payment system.<p>>Set up an Adwords campaign which began this morning, using a 100 dollar promo coupon from Google + 10 dollar activation fee. Spending 3.33 a day on advertising, testing the system out using google's cash instead of my own. From that I garnered 3 clicks, 1985 impressions, for a %.15 Click through rate. (Here's a question: is that good or bad? The campaign literally started at midnight.)<p>Basically if the site fails, I'll have lost around 20 bucks. I also have the option of repping wholesale to retailers in the area, so I'm not entirely dependent on the site, thought I would like for it to be an automated source of income.<p>Haven't had any "real" sales yet. Processed two orders, one from family, one from a friend, and the company later informed me they'd just send it to my family for free - essentially I've earned back my 20-something dollar investment back already.<p>So - What do you think HN? How can I make this better and improve sales quickly? Anything I should be aware of from your own muse-creation experiences?<p>Thanks much!
One thing I would do is make the Visit our shop button a different color entirely than the background is. Dark blue on light blue is not screaming "click me to shop for the awesome product that I am selling you!"
Definitely agree that it doesn't look like a shop. Checkout my friends dropshipped-powered site <a href="http://seriouslyscuba.com" rel="nofollow">http://seriouslyscuba.com</a> - also inspired by Tim Ferriss' muse concept. If I were you I would quickly move away from wp-commerce into a real e-commerce solution (seriouslyscuba is on shopify by the way, so I guess you'd have to justify spending money on their high fees to go that route). The design looks good overall, I guess to me, its just that wordpress doesn't make for a good e-commerce solution. I'd hide the Categories block, RSS links, 'Comments are closed' text, i.e. anything that makes it looks like a blog-converted-to-store. Good luck nonetheless.
Good luck to you! It's inspiring to hear about starting a company on pocket change!<p>I'm wondering if you're allowed to use those "New York Times", CNN, etc logos... sometimes companies can be protective of their branding.<p>Do you plan to form an LLC or sole proprietorship?
First your website looks nothing like a shop to me. Spend some time looking at www.amazon.com and convince yourself that my chances to buy anything are much higher if your site looked like it.