Week 10, Monday
How I totally missed out on Woocommerce. Woocommerce came out in 2011. I tried setting up ecommerce sites in 2010 and said, no more! After trying solutions for WordPress, Joomla and Magento. There was just not simple solution available to build a platform myself, so I gave up on it. No more ecommerce for me! Never looked at Woo.
The WordPress platform is evolving rapidly. I was struggling with multilingual sites before, and ecommerce solutions. It was difficult back then, yet now there are so many solutions available that allow easy integration. It even became possible to use WordPress as a platform for application development.
Because of the clear demand for ecommerce integrations on Upwork, and my own need for a billing solution for my hosting services, I dived into Woocommerce today to check it out, and deep dived into payment integration with iDeal, the main online payment method in the Netherlands. Got it all sorted in a few hours and could receive payments in less than 24 hours. An amazing advance in technology.
Tuesday
I set up the web shop for my personal finance information site, and prepared products for free distribution and sale. I receive great feedback and many downloads on a few cashflow excel sheets, so I prepared those for this trial. The ability to receive (recurring) payments is just one of the features that a Software as a Service needs to have, but an important one. It is part of the essential infrastructure. I am not sure if this is something that I should be outsourcing according to the lean bootstrap movements, but I think I should do what I am capable off, and outsource other tasks.
The marketing activities, content creation and dispersion on social media, are processes that I am refining and documenting now, to be able to hand these tasks over to an assistant. Step by step moving forward.
Wednesday / Thursday
Set up Facebook advertising against all my principles doing a test with paid advertising. Ironically enough the first paid download came from organic traffic… Time will tell what source of traffic works best.
Friday:
Paperwork, boring migration stuff I will not bother you with. Lasts day not to detailed logs, but the bottemline is that I managed to get a product out for sale that I created myself and that was just floating around on my (virtual) disks somewhere.
I plan to publish some kind of a faq section on WordPress stuff, coming up next. The coming two weeks will be a bit different because of family visits, so we will have to see when and how.
