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SKMossSKMoss subscriber Posts: 3 Member

Hi all. I’m in a total quandary at the moment.

My Daughter and I have been running a small furniture repair business in So Cal and due to some major health issues and some contractor law requirements, the business isn’t going to go where we had anticipated.

I’ve been woodworking for most of my life as a hobby, and have enjoyed the role as professional woodworker. My Daugher (who also helps in the shop) runs the books part time while she’s in business school. She’s always been very interested in motivation, inspirational and sarcastic sayings.

So we’re combining talents and refocusing the business into home decor products. Signs, furniture, wall art, etc.

The amount of learning that this old dog has been doing is something to behold. Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, blogging, podcasting, and the list goes on.

When I started looking at the online side of things, I was pretty simplistic in my thinking. ECommerce site + Pinterest (my target market site smack dab in the middle of Pinterest). Blogging wasn’t even on my radar. Pretty quickly it became apparent that a blog would be necessary. And now, I’m starting to look at a monetized blog that also leads to our products is probably the right way to go.

So, here’s where we are right now. I have a Shopify site, with a blog. It’s up and running, but I haven’t opened it yet. I initially looked at WooCommerce, but liked the ease of use of Shopify. (NOTE: Outside of 10 years in the military I spent my adult life as a software developer, so while ease of use is nice, I’m not concerned about a technology play).

Now I’m thinking that I need to relook at WP for the much better SEO on the Blog side.

I see options as:

1) Stick with Shopify e-commerce and blog on one site.

This would be the easiest, but again, I see issues with a blog centric plan and less than stellar blogging platform.

2) Keep ecommerce in Shopify, but do blog on WordPress.

Kind of best of worlds in isolation, but combined I don’t know. I can use www.mysite.com for ecommerce, and blog.mysite.com for the blog. One serious problem with this is that I end up with customer list (mailing list) split on two platforms. I could see this as a potential nightmare. Linking products from the e-commerce site into the blog, and vice versa would be a very manual process due to split databases. DNS could become an issue as well.

3) Move everything to WordPress and WooCommerce.

(Having written this, I probably answered my own question)

Only real problem is loss of a few days or evenings setting things back up here.

Now, if you got here, I REALLY appreciate it. Any thoughts or perspectives you have would be gratefully received.


Thanks,

Steve

Comments

  • SKMossSKMoss subscriber Posts: 3 Member

    Additional comment to #3. The shopify has a deep integration between blog and product pages. On a product page, it can display blog posts with related keywords. And on blog posts, it can display products with related keywords. This is via an "app".

    Potentially very valuable, but I haven't found similar function with word press/woocommerce. Not to say it doesn't do it, just I have not found out how.

  • AndyDAndyD subscriber Posts: 3 Member

    I am by no means an expert here but was wondering if you couldn’t pull clients from Shopify into your WordPress client table using phpMyAdmin? Assuming they are hosted via the same MySQL within your hosted environment. This might be something you could automate via a command line script?

    Anyway, just a thought.

    Andy

  • ilochkailochka subscriber Posts: 24 Bronze Level Member

    Do you create a website or is it an IT company?

  • afeez badmosafeez badmos subscriber Posts: 4 Member

    Hi SkMoss,

    I am a developer in SoCal, Menifee .

    You can host your site on Heroku.com or gitHub.com ,netifly or

    you can use firebase. and even point the hosting to your customized domain name.

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