Jenna Sheehan Final Project Proposal
For my final project, I am proposing an online retail clothing store that sells Lularoe clothing. Lularoe is a wholesale clothing manufacturer which allows you to purchase their clothing at wholesale price and sell them retail for a specified markup price. As a small business, I will begin by selling a limited supply of women’s clothing and then possibly expand from there. The unique part about Lularoe is that they only make a limited number of each piece of clothing and you cannot request certain prints, only sizes. This simply means that the clothing I will be selling will be unique and no two pieces of clothes will be the same(for the most part). This will make for a different type of retail store. Typically when you purchase clothes, there are numerous sizes in one style. Lularoe is unique, because if you see a shirt you like and it is in your size, if you do not purchase it when you see it, you may not find that specific design again.
I want to make the website easy to navigate. There will be a homepage, describing what Lularoe is all about. The tabs on the page will be for each of the different types of clothes that I sell. Because my inventory will vary by not only clothing type but size as well, the merchandise will be searchable by size. I will also include tabs for shipping costs as well as a sizing guide. The tab with the shipping costs will include the different types of shipping offered as well as the time it takes to ship the item(s). The final product will probably be designed with GoCentral. Although I have not worked with GoCentral, there appears to be many benefits to using it, from the ease of use and intuitive interface to security features. GoCentral also has a built-in shopping cart, which I would definitely use. I would also give customers the option to login, which would give them a quicker checkout, and it would save their shopping cart for a period of time so they could go back to it if they would like. Another benefit of the shopping cart is the abandoned cart recovery feature.
As for a webhost, I will utilize GoCentral as well, which appears to be a subsidiary of Go Daddy. Additionally, they have minimal downtime and offer 24/7 support for their clients. Another benefit of using GoCentral is that I will have access to security features as well. They provide SSL Certificates which use advanced encryption to prevent hackers from reading any important data that customers provide to the site. There is also the option to upgrade the SSL Certificate in order to accommodate my needs as my business grows. Although it is $29.99 per month, GoCentral appears to be the complete package for an e-commerce site. It includes PayPal integration along with credit card acceptance. One major benefit is the search engine optimization (SEO), which improves the ranking on search engines. There is also Email marketing and social media integration, which appears to be easy to set up and implement.
Works Cited
Go Daddy. (2017). Retrieved April 1, 2017, from GoCentral Website Builder: https://www.godaddy.com/websites/website-builder#carousel
Lularoe. (2017). Retrieved March 28, 2017, from Lularoe: http://www.lularoe.com/our-story-home