Business and I Part 3: E-commerce

Hi all, quite a long time since I posted  about the 2nd part. So How is everybody? Its 2011 already and its coming to 2nd quarter of 2011. So where did I stop last time, digital point……online business…….bal bal bal………ok for this part 3 of this entry I would like to tell you guys about my first fully functioning online shop and guess what I’m selling? Tudung….yes its tudung bawal to be specific. Why? Girl buying power…

After some searching works , readings and discussions I decide to name my online shop www.tudung-bawal.com (this is not my first domain). It is very straight forward, everybody will instantly what is my business all about when looking at the name of my website(this is part of the many tips you can find in the internet). For this e-commerce website I have decided to use OScommerce

To make things more interesting, starting from designing, coding, testing and promoting was done by myself(actually no budget to hire people).  So from this activity I learn alot about PHP coding, photoshop, SEO and so on. Every tips and tutorials I followed from the internet in order to materialized my first online shop.

Alhamdullilah, everything when well and I launched my website. From time to time, my website started to gain its own popularity, my website has got no.1 ranking in google for the keyword “tudung bawal”. My sales increase locally and even internationally(UK, US, Australia). During the operation, anything regarding the backends will be hendle by me and anything related to frontend will be cover by wife.

One thing that is not so good about my business is its seasonal. My online shop has manage to stand for a few years, until tudung bawal is not a trend anymore and the arrival of the blogging era.

Next: Blog makes money…….

Business and I : Part 2 – Early Cyber Ventures

Beginning of the year 2004, the so call online business started to boom like mushrooms in Malaysia. Business involving e-books, prepaid, clicking and watching advertisement and MLM flooding Malaysia’s world of cyber like hell. During that time, email  was the main media in spreading this kind of information. From small to big amount of investment had been made by people of Malaysia in order to join this great hype, and that does not exclude me.

I had tried so many programs available in the Internet and all was up to the free version only(reading email, watching ads,etc). Non was a success. Later, I decided to try a paid version. The first paid program I’d join was a MLM base ebooks selling program. It was about RM40 in order to join the program. We will be given  our own website in order to promote our e-books. I’d tried so hard to promote my first venture, from classified, email, forums and even flyers(did not materialize). I had manage to get quite a number of downlines, but the not so easy part is to ask them to join as a paid members. Before I manage to make anybody a paid member, the website of this program suddenly disappeared and history. Below is one example of the ads that I used to post which I manage to dig back from the internet

Talking about own website, I remember starting my first website using Geocities free service during my Universty days(2000). My first website was called cerihik.com which a portal for people to submit thier stories to be publish on the Internet. I would say it maybe among the first of its kind in malaysia at that time but unfortunately I did not take it seriously and I stop maintaining the website after about a year in operation.(can believe ka this…up to you).below is a snapshot of my Intro page

From the power of Internet you can view my first website here.

After so many failures, I was then introduced to a forum which full of information on online busines, Digital Point Forum. Here is the place i learn a lot about Internet, website, ecommerce, Graphic design, ebay, paypal,etc. Here is the point were I start to get involved in a real online business. Will be contine……….