Friday, August 31, 2007

Are We Ready for Ecommerce?

Wednesday night we had a Band Boosters organizational meeting to try and figure out what is happening with band this year and how the Band Boosters can help. I am trying to get a blog together for communication between the band director and parents and also between the Band Boosters and parents. Hopefully we can get more parents involved. Wouldn't that be nice?

One of the big things the Band Boosters do, besides help with uniforms and field trips, is to run fund raisers during the year. One of our moms mentioned the possibility of selling some of our t-shirts and other band products online - through our blog. So I started looking for some kind of shopping cart software, otherwise I have no idea how we could do that. AShop Commerce would be one possibility. It looks like it is supposed to be really easy for anyone to set up. You can put together an online store, provide customers with an online shopping cart, and accept credit card and PayPal payments all in one place. They have different package levels, based on the number of products you want to sell, your bandwidth needs, and web space needed.

For a business, I think their prices are quite reasonable - though I haven't actually looked into anything like this before. However, I don't think our Band Booster Association will sell enough items to justify doing this. I guess we'll have to stick with good old-fashioned selling face-to-face. We're just not ready for ecommerce software.