Episode 56 is the third of four shows in a series on Starting Your WordPress Online Store,  sponsored by Bluehost. In this show, we chat with Jonathan Martin, President and Founder of Cool Blue Web, a full-service web development agency. Jonathan’s agency has worked with tons of clients on eCommerce sites, guiding many of them through the process of going from brick and mortar to online. Some have added the online as a digital version of their store. Others closed their brick and mortar shops after making the move to online. Listen as he shares his experience and gives you some great tips on making this transition.

We chatted about:

* Whether physical shop owners are aware of what the transition to online takes

* The top two things that a shop owner should think about before making the transition

* How many products you should start with when launching your site

* The benefits of having both and how you can use your brick and mortar store to market your online shop

* Jonathan’s experience working with a client who shut down their physical presence after going online

* One of Jonathan’s most challenging projects when taking a client through this transition

Thanks to Our Podcast Sponsor: Bluehost

Transcript

You can also download the transcript of this show: WordPress eCommerce Show March 6 2017

Bob Dunn: Hey everyone, welcome back to the WP Commerce Show. Bob Dunn here, also known as Bob WP on the web. Today is the third show of our series, Starting your Word Press Online Store. Last Monday, we talked about how to make sure you have the right stuff in place when starting your online store, all the things beyond the plug-in, the theme, and building the site. The week before, we covered the plug-in part and looked at some tips for choosing your e-Commerce plug-in.

Today we are talking about a specific scenario: when the owner of a physical store decides to go online. There are some practices that apply equally to an online shop and a brick-and-mortar store. But there is also a learning curve that comes with its own set of challenges. To help you as a retail store owner to make this transition, we have Jonathan Martin, President and founder of Cool Blue Web. I know that the team there has helped numerous clients through this process, so I’m happy to welcome him to the show.

Hey, Jonathan, thanks for joining us today.

Jonathan Martin: Awesome, Bob. Thanks for the great introduction there.

Bob Dunn: So Jonathan, can you tell us a bit about yourself and Cool Blue Web?

Meet today’s guest: Jonathan Martin from Cool Blue Web

Jonathan Martin: Yeah, absolutely, Bob. We actually started out as a merchant seven years ago. I ran five eCommerce stores. They were small stores, on a different platform, called Magento. I wish WooCommerce was around then. It would have been awesome. They were great little drop ship business models. We never had to touch product. We processed orders. Then I fell in love with the building of eCommerce stores. As we were building out a web agency, everyone said, “Hey, you have experience working on eCommerce stores. Can you work on mine?” We started up as a Magento shop. As WooCommerce came on the scene, we began doing a lot more Woo. Now it’s about 50/50. That was seven years ago. We’re an agency of somewhere between 20 and 25 people. All focused, all of our people here in the U.S. out of our Seattle office.