Freecommerce

When the pandemic hit, it hit some businesses harder than others. The hospitality trade felt significant impact. Pubs and Independent breweries faced a significant challenge on how to survive the coming, days, weeks and what would turn out to be months.

For many traditional pubs and breweries the idea of selling beer direct to consumers online for local / national delivery didn't make business sense - but overnight that changed. The challenge many faced was this digital experience was alien and also any funds were allocated to just surviving, not building online commerce that may or may not work. I thought it must be possible to help here and solve that issue so I asked myself a question.

Is it possible to create a website with a full CMS, full ecommerce and payments system on a professional domain for zero outlay?

The short answer was lets finds out...

This meant a number of things to get in place.

1) Domain Name
2) Hosting
3) Payments system
4) Product Catalogue
5) Product photography and web imagery
6) Editable CMS system

And some other things I hadn't considered.

The other challenge was this had to be quick!

Why quick? well pubs had shut, beer was being poured down the drain and for these businesses money was disappearing everyday with no ability to trade.

Why wouldn't the business just buy a Wix, or FreeStore online or something - this came down to knowledge, skill, not looking professional enough, not having the flexibility or features needed for this industry area.

So I set about seeing what could be done. Coming from the mindset of building multimillion pound enterprise ecommerce systems - zero outlay seemed like something worth taking on.

It would mean rethinking how things could and should go together and introduce a simplicity mindset, after all complexity costs! It also had to be easy to use for the business taking this on - some who rarely use computers.

...in my next post l'll explain how this was achieved (not achieved)