One of my first entrepreneurial endeavors was MyNiceTie. When I got home from serving in Russia a friend, and business partner, gave me $7,000 to start what we thought would be a nationwide necktie company. I took the investment, flew to South Korea, and bought 2,000 ties. At that time, having a website wasn’t even in the plan, I just knew I could buy ties for almost nothing and sell them cheaper in the US for a healthy profit (brilliant strategy, right? ;). This was the decision that led me to a love an passion for internet ventures.
The latest news with MyNiceTie is I just finished the redesign the site. I transferred everyting from Magento on my server to Shopify. I needed to do it quickly, so I used a pretty sweet responsive template and created a custom homepage banner. I also created a better product sorter on the category page.
For years MyNiceTie was build on Magento and I never had time to keep up with updates. I also found Magento to be slow and bulky on both the front-end and admin. This week it was time for an upgrade and although I started to design a new Magento site, I quickly ran into the bulky mess of transferring my old site to a new one. At this point I wondered if there was anything new in eCommerce these days.
Interestingly enough, not much has changed in the past couple years in eCommerce. Magento is still the leader and there are a couple other platforms, each with their pros and cons. However, I came across an article that mentioned Shopify. I had heard of them repetitively because of their sponsorship of Mixergy, an entrepreneurial podcast I love, but I had never looked into them.
I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. I loved the idea that I’d never have to worry about another update, I also loved the fact that my site would load noticeably faster than on Magento. In addition, it was very easy to switch, although it could have been even easier if they had fixed a bug that cost me about 5 hours of dev time.
The platform isn’t perfect yet though, there are a couple things I really don’t like about their solution and if you know of any others, let me know below. The ones I’ve found so far are you can’t use a custom SSL certificate and the product importer needs to be improved. For now, however, I can live with these problems.
I launched the new site early Friday morning and its too early to tell, but so far direct traffic and page views have doubled and it feels like orders have also increased. I’m sure I’ll give you an update shortly.
Till then, check out the site and let me know what you think below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Live Project Link: http://mynicetie.com
