Time Taken to construct your Store

[ITStore247]

Hi,

I have just purchased the entry level package, and wondered how long everyone took to build their store and start trading, from when you purchased your package.

Ian

[entertaintoday]

About 3-4 weeks for me, however I was already getting visitors from day 1 due to having an old site.

[lewey]

For me was 4 days from purchase to putting site live. Using the development site option for those 4 days. I made the decision to get the basic design how I wanted, and add some of my products, not all of them, as aim was to get the site live asap so that could start getting into the search engines. Then to add to and enhance the site subsequently. The slowest aspect for me was using photoshop to create some of my design elements, as I am not very proficient in photoshop - and was having to teach myself how to do some things as I went - taking me quite a few attempts to get a couple of elements done. Also having an existing protx account made it nice and quick to integrate that. And just getting to learn the bluepark system, where to look for different aspects within your settings etc took a few days to get use to, but got better with practise.

This is just for getting site live and so that it can trade - now is the building some traffic phase which obviously takes a bit longer.

[little-linguist]

Ours took about 2 months but that was mainly due to the fact that we had several hundred products to upload and I chose to do all the product listings individually rather than upload a feed based on our "old" site. I felt that it was a good time to "tidy up" all the listings with fresh descriptions and images etc and inevitably that took time!

I think the other element that can take time is getting your merchant account up and running if that's new to you. I know Protx took weeks when we first applied!

[Rocking Parties]

A good few months, but that was down to having several thousand products, a lot of which needed to be chopped and changed.

[entertaintoday]

Hi,
I have been using * for my hosting needs. They are really good providers. Moreover they have shopping cart software of their own. Its shopping cart software will install on virtually any web server, and does not require root access or special modules.

So short of coming on here to advertise their services, are you gonna answer the question you "replied" to? Do you not use Bluepark?

[Rich]

So short of coming on here to advertise their services

I think that was the general idea! :p

[little-linguist]

Hmm. Is there not a way of making this a private forum only open to Bluepark people to stop gatecrashers as above?

[Rich]

We considered making this a private forum, but this would involve quite a bit of administration (adding new users) and would also prevent genuine new enquiries from being posted.

A healthy dose of "moderation" will keep out the rabble though! ;)