Yes, I've revived my online honey shop at www.tastyhoney.com and so the experiment continues.
Its proving to be a somewhat frustrating experience.
Three main reasons are behind that frustration.
1, First, relatively few people buy honey online anyway.
This is hardly surprising, because grocery is one of those categories that has been slow to develop online, and for obvious reasons. It is hard to find competitively priced grocery products online.Delivery costs mean that the total cost is usually higher than a supermarket.
So few people even look to buy honey online.
2, Second, open source shopping carts like Zencart can be hard work.
A second reason the process has been frustrating is that my original Zencart shopping cart and catalogue proved incapable of updating.After a year of hibernation, it needed to be updated to a more current version, and to work with a newer version of SQL.
But upgrading at my current hosting provider -whitedoggreenfrog - proved problematic.
I reckon they'd changed the server permissions, and I couldn't sort them out.
Nor could I, as a relatively small customer, get my hosting provider to help me in a timely fashion with my issues.
So I have abandoned Zencart and have now revived the store in Magento community edition.
This is another free open source shopping cart software that I think is popular in the online retail developer community.
It is owned by eBay, however, and there are a number of paid versions of Magento that eBay probably prefers to support.
3, A third reason its frustrating is that, despite the poor returns, there is lots of competition
Even so, I have now got the site working, a modest catalogue of products on display, and I've racked up an initial sale.
I'm currently adding a blog, and have an Adwords promotion running to try and help build up profile, and help get the site in Googles organic results.
But even with all that, there is clearly a lot of competition our there, and the minimal margin on each jar suggests that I won't be getting rich any time soon.
Bee-keeping is one of those things that is relatively cheap to get into, and there are many, many bee-keepers out there, all producing honey.
They're all looking to sell their honey, and many do at local markets etc. (Another reason why epople don't need to buy honey online).
So there are lots of honey sites, and lots of competition for the few customers looking to buy online.
I'd of course, be grateful, for any comments, and any visitors to the site at www.tastyhoney.com
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