My wife and I have been busy training additional help for our business lately so things have been a little more hectic than usual. In addition to writing this blog, I’ve also been compiling a little handbook of all of the little day to day things we do to run our business in order to efficiently pass on the knowledge. I’ve also been placing more focus on my online store course and making slow but steady progress. In any case, it’s been a while since I’ve done a mailbag so here are a few questions from last week.

Question
I have just begun to read your blog and have found myself addicted to the content. I have read your e-book and have been thinking of doing an online store for years now…. well actually I was stuck for a while, it seemed as though I understood what I needed to …

In my previous article on My Latest Take On Hosted vs Non-Hosted Ecommerce Solutions, I recommended two hosted shopping cart solutions, Volusion and BigCommerce, that do not charge any transaction fees for using their service. Not being charged a percentage of your sales is nice because you can run your store at more or less a flat monthly rate(not taking into account credit card fees) that does not scale proportionally to your revenues.

A few weeks ago, I signed up for trial accounts with both Volusion and BigCommerce and decided to compare the two services. Before I get into the guts of the review, I’ll just tell you up front that you can’t really go wrong with either service and choosing between the two really depends on which features and factors you value more.

I also wanted to mention that I’m not going to really go into that much …

As long as I’ve been writing tutorials on how to open an online store, I’ve always advocated going with a free open source shopping cart and hosting it yourself as opposed to signing up for an all-in-one hosted ecommerce solution. After all, if you host your shopping cart yourself, you’re in charge of your own destiny. You have full control over the source and no one can suddenly raise prices on you. Plus, there are many cool things that you can do on your own that the big hosted solutions won’t allow you to do.

Photo By Kevin McShane

But after running this blog for a couple of years now and listening to reader feedback, I’ve come to realize that using an open source ecommerce solution and self-hosting may not be the right solution for everyone.

Some people are just completely tech averse and don’t want to deal anything remotely …

My wife just closed the books on our mid year numbers (January – June) and I’m proud to say that year over year profits are up in the double digits yet again. Running the store these last 6 months was much harder for a variety of reasons which I’ll outline below. But what’s remarkable about this year’s gains is that my wife and I have barely touched the business. Essentially, the business has grown all by itself through word of mouth and without our intervention.

Normally, I wouldn’t be proud to say that we did “nothing”, but this past year was all about survival. Late last year, our second child was born and we also had this crazy notion that moving to a bigger house at the same time was a good idea.

In fact, there was this short period last December in which our timeline was …

I’ve been writing this blog and helping would be entrepreneurs for nearly two years now and one thing I’ve discovered is that you can’t really push someone to take the entrepreneurial plunge. Either you have the desire to start your own business or you don’t and most people can’t get over the uncertainty that’s involved with being your own boss.

Photo By Anirudh Koul

Recently, I went through each and every email that I’ve ever received on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com and found that the majority of people get stuck on 2 main things when starting their business. One, they can’t come up with a good business idea and two, they aren’t confident that they can succeed.
I Can’t Come Up With An Idea
I’ve found that most people who have problems coming up with good business ideas are self-deprecating.

“I’m not that creative. How am I going to come up with …

I just wanted to preface this review by saying right off the bat that Charlie’s book is inspiring, well worth the read and the best part is that it’s absolutely free. In fact, at the end of this article, I will post a download link where you can download Charlie’s book immediately. Charlie also runs a blog called Charlie Hoehn’s Musings that you should check out as well.

These past few years have been tough for most people. The economy has been in the dumps and many of you have lost your jobs. Judging by my email inbox, several of you are just scraping by and a good number of you are taking a stab at being your own boss because you have no other recourse.

The job market has been especially tough on recent graduates of college. After all, why would anyone hire a college graduate …

With just about any business these days, how well you handle customers is crucial in defining your reputation and how fast your business spreads via word of mouth. One of the early problems that my wife and I faced with our online store was how to deal with incoming calls from customers. After all, it was just the two of us and we weren’t equipped to handle large volumes of calls nor did we have an easy way to manage the calls that we did receive.

Photo By Dan Brady

Especially if you have small customer support team or even just a single person manning the phone lines, it is important to have some sort of virtual phone system in place. By handling your phone calls via the web or through a computer virtually, you can make it appear as though you have a large customer support team even …

Every now and then, an angry or dissatisfied customer will call us on our customer support line and it’s not a pleasant situation to deal with. No matter how good your products are or how good your quality control is, inevitably some customer won’t be happy with some part of your business. And the worst part is that the customer may not always be reasonable. No business is immune to this. If you run your business long enough, getting an angry or unreasonable customer will eventually happen. It’s inevitable.

Don’t Let Customers Leave Angry

Photo By Josh Janssen

Due to the rise of social media, blogging, twitter and other lightning fast means of communication, it’s crucial that you pacify angry customers quickly and efficiently. All it takes is just one tweet, blog post or facebook entry and your reputation could be permanently marred. The …