The site is live!

After months of hard work getting our eCommerce business ready to launch, we’ve finally done it! Eliot Turner Ltd launched a few minutes ago and is ready to take orders of our exclusive handmade jewellery.

We’ve not got all our stock listed yet as this has been an extremely time consuming process. More items of stock will be added to over the next week or two. We’ve implemented a solid stock management system, which will allow us to reorder and list new stock on a weekly basis. As most of our items are either limited editions or one offs, we can offer our customers something extremely unique.

We’re already looking at diversifying into a few other areas but you’ll have to keep an eye on the site to find out more as it happens!

We’ve got a lot happening over the next few weeks so keep coming back to see how we’re doing. We’ll be sharing stats about visitors, turnover levels and experiences via the blog.

Over the last few months we’ve been working hard to get our ecommerce site (www.eliotturner.com) up and running. We had planned to get everything finished much sooner but have had numerous challenges which we’ve had to overcome. These have included problems with suppliers, changes to our team, increased work load at carrotmedia and other unforeseen problems. We could have pushed for a pre-Christmas launch but decided this was going to be unwise as you can see from our post “Why miss the Christmas Rush”.

I’m happy to report that we’re now only 10 days from our official launch day and are in the final stages.

We’ve prepared a number of blog posts, which will be released over the next 10 days that will give you an insight into our challenges to get this far.

I hope you come back and visit us on launch day which will be the 1st of February 2010. In the meantime enjoy the posts!

When we took the decision to setup an online shop/store, it was a pretty daunting thought to have. We looked at the big reasons why we were doing it and what we were going to do, it’s not everyday two guys and then two guys and one girl decide to start selling jewelery online and especially in the middle of a ‘recession’.

First things first – To hell with the recession, we’re now in a time when we can do this and when we do it well, we’ll dominate the marketplace. If you have a product or service which is worthwhile to a customer base you can do what we’re doing as well.

So that’s where the blog came into things. I wanted to give back something back to an extensive amount of readers.

As I’ve said before, time was well against us and to spend time on designing and developing our own blog as well as client work and designing and developing the ecommerce shop was just not feasible.

I’ve personally been using WooThemes for a long time now on my other blogs, and following Adii, Magnus and Marks journey with their web startup and have a lot of respect for the guys. I could have gone elsewhere to grab a theme from places like ThemeForest but none of them perfectly suited the kind of content we were going to be giving away with the eCommerce experiment. Not only that but if we ran into any kind of problems with the theme we were going to choose, I knew that WooThemes customer service is the best there is in my opinion. If you can’t find a solution in their extensive support forum then ask a question and one of the WooNinja’s usually get back to you super quick.

Prior to announcing what the eCommerce experiment was going to be I’d pondered over the idea of which theme to use. Quite literally hours later, Woo announced a forthcoming theme called ‘The Station’. Immediately the theme was the winner. It had everything we wanted. Just recently they’ve upgraded it to add in various other features which will help us when we start adding in video’s (yes they are coming…).

So that’s it, we were woo’d by woo for their awesome customer service, their bullet proof themes and rockin’ designs.