Babywearing Business Blog

Last week due to popular demand from the babywearing community, I launched a new community catered to all the families with a new Digital SLR camera!

For our kickoff, I’m giving away a free online class from Perfect Picture School of Photography (valued at $195)! Be sure to join if you love photography.

DSLR Community - Digital SLR Community

Also, our http://www.babyslingoutlet.com site is now live and taking orders.

Wowsa, I had a really tough month last month!

As you know from my previous scanty posts here, I did some HUGE changes to our site. The result has stressed me out so bad, I had a severe 3 hour panic attack one night, had such intense muscle tension that it left me exhausted all day. In the midst of it all, I tried to get healthy by running alot, but in the end I overdid it and burned out.

Crossed my husband and my mind to just sell the business and lead a much more simpler, peaceful life.. Decided to wait until I was normal.

A few sessions with my therapist on how to BREATHEEE and support from my babywearing vendor friends, and as of this week I’m back on track to my usual, optimistic, ambitious self!

That little breakdown out of the way, here’s what I’m going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again:

1. I trained my Office Manager alot of my job to share the load.
2. Learning how to Breathe and Relax if I feel any tension and my shoulders cringing up.
3. Getting to bed at a healthy time instead of 2-4am.
4. Drinking water instead of chain-drinking Diet Mountain Dews. (hard to do!)
5. Venting frustrations in a healthy way by jogging/hiking
6. Starting up yoga!

and have launched my new baby sling shop for Attached to Baby!

http://www.AttachedToBaby.com

This is the culmination of everything I have learned, and I’m very proud of it. There is still alot of work to do, but the switch to the new Able Commerce 7 shopping cart and the new design is done!

To celebrate, David took us all out for dinner and then we browsed at Borders. That was a much needed rest of from work. I then got a full 8 hours sleep last night after many nights of staying up until 3-4m in the morning and still getting up at my regular time.

Now, I am currently upgrading our Community and Live Chat…

Ok, my www.babyslingoutlet.com site has its SSL cert installed and everything except for the products (lol) is ready to go!

A quick bit of background on me: I was a web programmer and loved working in ASP.NET, so naturally I will only look at .NET shopping cart ecommerce platforms. My first - www.storefront.net was launched in March 2005. They concentrate on flashy marketing but the service was terrible. The product also lacked in what I wanted. Next up was BVC5, which I launched about a year ago in February 2007. Much, much better! Very SEO-friendly, developer-friendly and extremely responsive development team. A few other Storefront.net users followed me.

However, there are some major features that I thought would be in the product by now STILL missing. I need product kits/bundles, gift-wrapping options, and AJAX-everywhere. Aside from a little AJAX, BVC5 doesn’t have any of that, and no gift registry, or easily maintainable gift cards/certificates.

I am about to launch www.babyslingoutlet.com using www.aspdotnetstorefront.com. What appealed to me was their nice store user interface, and gift registry options. I’ll try it out with my outlet store and report back.

Today I just noticed that AbleCommerce (http://www.ablecommerce.com/)  came out with version 7.0. With a slick new website homepage and even an improved user shopping cart design, I am hooked! So far, it has everything I wanted except for highly-customizable URLs but that could be in the works.

Here’s a sample demo site that was created for me in just a few seconds, it will work for 30 days from today:

http://ac7.ablecommerce.com/700029074207/DIDYMOS-Waves-Baby-Wrap-P44.aspxI love it can show product inventory, AJAX so it updates the photos, price from the swatches right out of the cart. BVC5 does this but not from swatches. Yet another highly desirable Able Commerce feature is when adding a product to your cart, you can first choose a print, and then dynamically the page will show what sizes are available! Sooo nice and a feature I always wanted.The Product Rating system is more thorough - allows for Name, Location, and Title along with Rating and Review. BVC5 only allows Rating and Review. Just a sample of little things that I like.

I love the improved Wish Cart. On the “wish list” you can set Priority and Comment for each item! I’m pretty positive their Wish List is a workable Gift Registry. Something I also love is separate Gift Options for each product, and you can see photos of different gift wrap colors. Easily put a free Gift message with no gift wrap, or add gift wrap for a certain amount. As a baby shop that has alot of baby shower gifts people buy, this is really needed! And on the same Checkout page, if you have multiple items in your cart, you can ship them to different addresses. Storefront.net did this, but I never saw that BVC5 offered this feature. And our customers did indeed use the ship to different addresses feature when we had it, so this was missed! It even allows for special Delivery Instructions via a note with the order.

The checkout process seems to be all on one page, which is pretty cool.

Well, I didn’t intend this to be such a long “review”, but I’ll definitely add more to this as I play more with Able Commerce and Aspdotnetstorefront. So far, Able Commerce has my best vote out of all the top 4 ASP.NET shopping carts!

Judy arrived to work at Attached to Baby as a model, but I wasn’t so sure that a realistic mannequin was appropriate in the baby sling business for photos. Anyway, I was at REI yesterday and found some clothes on sale so on a whim, bought some clothes for her and my husband and I set her up last night.

And here she is, sporting an Oopa Do’rag, an EllaRoo Organic Mahogany ring sling and of course REI attire.

The photo is a little on the dark side, as I posted the photo straight from the warehouse shipping computer. And of course, it is always a rare treat when I get a real live model! Here’s my 3 year old daughter modeling an Oopa silk Do’rag and a Rockin’ Baby kid’s sling:

This week has been a wee bit scary as my main computer here in my home office burned out its video graphics card. It is a powerful computer, and although most important things are backed up online, I still had photos that were on the computer that weren’t backed up yet! Luckily, David figured out the video card died and overnighted me a new one, and hooray, the computer is alive again!

Soon I’ll write about my plans for putting my entire business online - mail, banking, Quickbooks, backups, etc…

The big $1000 giveway Baby Sling Photo contest is almost done!

Our customers and babywearing friends nominated the best photos, and luckily I still remember some database and web programming skills to display the top 200!

Ha, another brand new domain:

http://www.babyslingphotos.com/

Some entries were spammed by the submitters, lol, but here are some of the top ones that I like:

I just want to get some feedback on what photos to vote for the categories, and then the FINAL voting begins!

GOOD luck to all that entered!

So I *finally* finished the Baby Sling submissions, we got over 1000 emails, and I entered almost 900 photos in the Baby Sling Contest Gallery. It is now 2:30am in the morning, and on a weekend to boot!

The submissions started coming early Thanksgiving week and we were still getting a few today, although the entries officially ended 11/30, I let the late ones through (I’m a nice gal that way).

ALSO this week, I updated and applied some major service packs to both the ATB Sling shop and community!

I think I have to start using the treadmill to undo all the constant desk work I’ve done since getting back from Thanksgiving vacation. My body really is almost begging for some exercise.

Coming up mid-December is a brand new face-lift to the home page of our shop! $2000 should bring it up to modern online shop standards, I’m hoping! The same company who did our initial design (except for the shop home page) will be doing this, and starting this week, to finish hopefully in a week.

Well, good night and I think I can actually relax a bit tomorrow, the hard work is done for awhile!

Ok, really, I’m a terribly geeky gal, ever since I got my first computer about 10 years ago.

I play with beta code and build websites using it before most people have heard of it. I experiment with the latest software. And the shopping cart I am currently using for Attached to Baby shop is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005. I was one of the first “big” shops to use it once it was released a year ago, and the first to apply their service packs.

This weekend Service Pack 3 was released and I planned it all and the update went smoothly, only 10 minutes down to apply the updates and do quick tests. The BVCommerce team was fast in helping me with any issues/bugs I found, and I really love this shopping cart. I hope to talk more about them in the future. I have used Storefront.NET and they put all their money into flashy advertising, but I felt none was invested in making their customers happy. BVC is the opposite, they could benefit from a prettier site, but wow, am I impressed with being able to chat with them and got problems fixed, usually within minutes or hours!

I feel they could have done a better job pre-testing, but I guess sometimes you just need a live shop to find those bugs. So the past day my search was useless, return RMA’s cannot be generated, my categories weren’t returning my products, but returning inactive ones I don’t want customers to see. But, within a day or just hours of posting these issues, they’ve all been resolved!

And though due to the site issues that made it hard to find things for a day, we still had four nice orders, all over $200! One was over $300, and one was over $400. Thank you, it saved my day.

 Now, back to going through the 200 emails that keep piling up for the $1000 Giveway Photo Contest. I’ll leave you with one of my current favorites, no make that 2 favorites:

Maybe I’m biased, but the first one is a FreeHand Mei Tai in the Attached to Baby exclusive Green Blossoms Silk, and the second is a Storchenwiege Leo Marine that really shows off the weave and the baby’s adorable blue eyes!

Here’s our last of the year contest, and it’s a biggest we’ve done! We’re giving away over $1000 in shopping sprees for submissions to our ATB Photo Contest Thanksgiving 2007 as our way of saying ‘thank you’ to our customers!

Check them all out here:

http://www.attachedtobaby.com/photos/slings/

 Here’s a little taste of what’s been submitted:

Well, this week both David my husband and I are working from home, but we have a little guest helping us. Our daughter is sick with a fever, cough, the works. Poor Satori!

So I kept her home yesterday and today and David and I took turns caring for our little sick one. We both have offices right by where she plays, so we both could get quite alot done, but I had planned to do a big photoshoot this week. Guess it will be delayed a bit.

Also, I uploaded the skeleton of my new Outlet shop: http://www.babyslingoutlet.com/

So it’s live now, but obviously not ready for orders!