I'm a little conflicted these days because I need to be focused on sales and promotion, but I also need to get the online shopping solution for my website up and running. It's kind of difficult to do both; in spite of my relatively technical background, I never particularly had much talent for writing code, so it takes me longer than it should.
Also, I discovered sort of fatal flaws with the shopping cart system offered by my web presence provider that make me not want to use it... problems with the shipping calculations, inability to distinguish between taxable and non-taxable goods (which affects my in-state customers when I sell food products), and some other problems like how to connect to a payment gateway. I think I will either need to pick some other system or roll my own sooner than I had hoped.
This morning I met with a furniture designer to discuss a retail display rack, or point-of-presence, for the dragon beard candy. He works with bamboo wood products, so it's a good fit for displaying products from the dragon beard candy company, whose brand name is Bamboo Garden. I think the racks will be a little bit expensive, but should be helpful for merchandising the products in many retail locations.
I made a dent in some of my web code, but I have a number of long nights ahead of me to make it functional. I hope it doesn't distract me from the work that's more important. I learned when I started thinking about making business cards and similar types of materials that it was much more cost-effective to hire a designer for that than to do it all myself, even though I once did a lot of graphic design and layout work. Changing my mindset, acquiring all the software, and tweaking and so on costs money, and keeps me from doing things that are probably more important. The same applies in this case, it just hits closer to home because I've been doing more closely related work more recently and I already have the tools I need... Still, I might have to decide whether to hire out the sales work or hire out the software work...