With age, you begin to understand that the most important thing is health. And the sooner this is realized, the better, so I made a small climbing wall for my nephew. And in order to increase the gaming appeal decided to hang the rope. I looked at the shops, there is only one ugly in the city, but there are no cables of decent thickness at all. There are some ropes on the Internet, but they are not cheap and, which is unpleasant, with coarse painted bolts. Okay, I'll order a piece of rope and I'll do it myself. But this was not the case, the Moscow sellers once again don’t want to raise the ass and sell mostly wholesale, but they refuse to send it to our region.
Thought it would stop me? As if not so. So, the rope can be ordered only by a large bay, to abandon our plans not in my rules, what to do with the remains? The thought came to combine a new hobby, organize a microbusiness and get a test platform for its development team.


And here it all began ...

Our team has been doing online shopping and an e-commerce platform for many years, a lot has been done, but I still want to achieve more. I have long blamed clients for how slow they are: giving them an idea, but it takes months to receive and approve of it. And so you want, as the idea came, immediately make a module for a new functionality and try it out in battle. It often happens that the vision in the presentation of the material is at variance with the client and a less optimal solution is realized. Design is generally a separate pain. Well, to whom I tell, you yourself know everything.
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In general, we set ourselves the task of designing the business and the online store for it from scratch. At the same time, there are no restrictions on creative thought By the way, ropes are an ideal subject for a test online store. The nomenclature is small, raw materials at a minimum, do not need any special production conditions. And the market is small, so as not to be distracted by operating activities.

Start

I will tell it as it is, no matter how ridiculous it may seem.
April 21, 2016 came the idea. The next day, attracted a friend, he was just on a sabbatical and happily engaged in invention. And it was necessary to invent a lot, or rather everything: product, marketing, production.
Initially, I had no doubt that I would be able to create a more aesthetic and high-quality product than that presented on the market. It was supposed not to limit themselves in price, because The high price for a premium product is normal. Nevertheless, some of the products we have turned out even cheaper than the market, well, great.
We naturally rebuilt from competitors because we used hand weaving as the main method of making rope trainers. Peeped at foreign colleagues, sometimes they do it in the Czech Republic and America. It turned out beautiful and durable.


To position themselves as professionals, they decided to cover the maximum range of all sports that can be made from ropes: climbing ropes, rope ladders, climbing ropes, tug-of-war ropes, as well as various swings and a trapeze.
Later, at the request of a foreign partner, we developed a unique rope for traction on triceps, this is not produced anywhere in the world. And a number of ideas are waiting in the wings.

Further, more: we decided to offer all the products in two materials, cotton and jute, to the choice of the buyer. In addition, each product can be purchased with a threaded ring and a carabiner in order to be convenient to hang and remove. All this at times expanded the range and added a headache when developing the interface of an online store.

An additional requirement: all our materials must be environmentally friendly. These are jute and cotton ropes, stainless steel, natural wood covered with natural oils, no varnishes and paints. The exception is the handles for the CrossFit ropes, but there’s no other way.

Production

For some reason, I got into my head that it is important to make brackets for people and then we will appear as angels descending from heaven, saying that we have taken care of you: both you and the bracket, hang and rejoice. But practice has shown their low demand. Thank God that we stopped on stainless steel double and trikaner brackets, although there was a thought to make another ceiling tire and even a wall bracket in the image of the Zemskovís horizontal bar.
Hence the moral for developers: your feature can be infinitely beautiful, but little demanded, so make a minimally working prototype and let it into the world to get regular feedback and refine the product.
According to the technology of the brackets, they thought a lot and decided not to engage in craftsmanship, but to make an adult order in production. The finished product, of course, no one was taken to do. There was no laser cutting in the city, with Moscow and St. Petersburg offices we were unable to establish an adequate dialogue remotely, it was closer and much cheaper for us to order in Lithuania. The hinges were made by themselves, welding was entrusted to a good specialist. When tests were carried out, it was possible to break the bracket with a hammer, therefore, to ensure maximum reliability, we welded the loops on both sides of the plate. It is a little more expensive, but we are calm for durability. And then the tedious process of polishing (while in manual mode) and here's the result:

We buy ropes directly from the manufacturer in large bays, so even with logistics it goes fine. The ropes were chosen from good quality materials, although more expensive. Rings and carbines were chosen from A2 stainless steel so that you could easily hang the products not only indoors, but also in nature. Galvanization is erased and then gives a rusty mark (well, just not cool). We were looking for a supplier for a long time in order to make a reasonable price for finished products. With blanks for stair rails, too, was an ambush. Ordered in two companies at once. One sent with great delay, the other did not send at all, and then the site also stopped working. In general, there are enough pitfalls even in such a microbusiness.
The most interesting thing was to figure out how best to create products, so that they were both durable, beautiful, and eco-friendly. Which nodes to select, how to fix, how to handle tips. Even a simple rung ladder has its own know-how, which allows you to maintain maximum strength and prevent scrolling.

Online store

Website design must match the level of products, so we attracted a proven designer. But the designer will not make the most important thing - good photos. It is fortunate that my partner is not only a great producer, but also an amateur photo. This allowed us to save a significant amount.
I was engaged in an online store myself, without delegating work to content managers. To verify the system, it was important to personally perform all the steps, starting with the formation of the site structure, its content, integrations, and the visualization in the unit. At the end of the work, I still had to attract a typesetter in order to bring the site look closer to the intended design. On July 5, 2016, the site finally filled up, and it began to take on a decent look.

At the stage of creating an online store, many unpleasant moments awaited me. When you create the whole site yourself, you see all the flaws in the design of the system. It seems to work, but it is inconvenient, it can be improved there to bring the test faster, in another place the form is not very beautiful, but somewhere in general bugs come up. I had to rework the import module from CSV, because The needs of my test project exceeded the previous ones, but the stability of the system increased. We made a number of new modules, all sorts of exports and auto-postings, spent time ordering on Yandex.Market (as it later turned out to be in vain for this project, but it works successfully in other projects). In general, amused as I could. The result was the following system:

1. Price and cost calculation is done in Google spreadsheets. If necessary, a couple of files are saved in CSV format and prices are updated on the website, new positions are automatically created.
2. The site has a structure and, if necessary, only corrects or supplements the content. News machine posts on the social network, there is also an unloading of goods in Vkontakte. Previously, the content manager, without any doubt, brought the entire range there manually! Emotions overflowed.
3. Purchase of goods is simple, through the basket. Registration is not required. Captcha is hidden. Payment by invoice or other options from Yandex.Money. We decided not to bother with the delivery, but to make people happy: the delivery is free throughout almost all of Russia.
4. The store manager has access to the list of orders. Receives alerts for new orders and payments. The buyer receives notifications about each change in the status of his order.

5. Analytics is a built-in and in parallel connected extended analytics of Google.
6. The store manager plans advertising activity right in the system and immediately monitors performance using the Rekadzor module, although for the time being we check with Google analytics for control. The system allows you to make discounts and carry out promotions, for example, to distribute coupons and track responses in the system.


The online store works, regularly accepts and ships orders. But there is still a large field for experimentation and refinement, which we slowly do.

What I learned from this project

Someone will say why bother so much, but I believe that to create an outstanding product, you need to put yourself in the client’s place and fully immerse yourself in the problematic.

Managing the manufacturing business is not easy, although it is somehow easier than IT, because here the control object is clearly expressed. Once again, I became convinced that the Internet is a wonderful thing, allowing you to start your business not limited to the local region. Thanks to the Internet, many things can be sold directly from the manufacturer to the consumer, although retail chains still dominate the market. I hope, as incomes grow, people will develop taste and they will more often buy quality items directly from small producers.

Being engaged in this project, I myself felt the problems and aspirations of small business, the psychology of the people who deal with it. It is difficult for a person to work on several fronts at once, and then this incomprehensible Internet marketing. Again, not every entrepreneur can immediately afford all the technologies that I have applied in this project. Therefore, the idea arose to change the concept of our platform and, for a start, put into the open access a basic solution, as well as lower prices for additional modules so that every business could afford a functional online store. This experience allowed us to form a vision of an ideal e-commerce platform, but this is another story and another article.