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Welcome to eMediaSales. While this is not strictly an article
specific to e-commerce, the first installment of our article
series will help you get to know us - why we're here and where
our passion lies. Whether you're here researching various
e-commerce consultants, hosts or designers or already a customer
and trying to get to know us better, I hope you'll stay a while,
read a few articles and decide that working with eMediaSales is
the right thing for your business.
My first business
I don't know the exact date or my age - but as I recall this
story I believe I was about 8 years old. For one reason or
another, I had asked my father how I could earn some money. I think
perhaps the motivation was a shiny new chrome BMX dirt bike
that I had seen at the local bike shop. Regardless of the date
or my motivation, the fixation of earning drove me to the
very specific question: how can I earn one hundred dollars.
Fortunately for me, the cranky old man who lived next door was
a millionaire with an autobiography to prove it (see Ninety-nine
year lease on cloud nine). He had made a small fortune in the mahoghany business,
talked on occasion about how Baltimore was the most beautiful
city in the states, and his favorite song Stardust. I actually think he might have been 99
when my father walked me next door to ask this esteemed entrepreneur
how to make it in business. His answer was as simple as it was
brief. After the three minutes it took the old crank to get to
the door to open it, he gave me 7 words in fewer seconds, then
slammed the door. You have to have something to sell.
While the answer struck me as clear - and yet odd to say to a
child of my age who's worldy possessions to sell included a few
Tonka trucks - it wasn't extraordinarily helpful at that time. So
my father suggested perhaps mowing lawns might work in a pinch.
So until I was about 14, I mowed lawns around the neighborhood and
at my fathers office. Then it occurred to me - perhaps due to the
95 degree summer heat with 95 percent humidity of South Florida - that I preferred
to work indoors. So I took my first entrepreneurial step and hired
out the labor at half what I was paid and became a manager.
A programmer's beginnings in e-commerce
After graduating from Georgia Tech, working a few years for Motorola then
a few more for Georgia Tech Research Institute, I was ready to
set out once again on my own to build a small business IT and web
consulting firm named Copernicus Business Systems. One of my first real clients was Alpha Delta Pi
national sorority. They had an online Gift Mart to sell their
"pride" to their members that included a simple order form to print
out and fax in. In 2001 - they were ready to begin taking online
orders and needed a programmer to build them a web store. In my inexperience,
I underestimated the job of building an online store from the
ground up and did what most engineers would do when faced with such a problem. I started looking
for off the shelf components I could buy to help build the store.
That's when I found and built my first store with Miva Merchant.
The store is still up and running, and with a few exceptions it looks much as it
did when I last touched it over six years ago. It's not an extraordinary
work of art - remember I'm an engineer by training, a programmer by trade
and definitely not an artist. But it is functional and gets the job
done effectively for the target captive audience.
I found working with Miva Merchant very easy - unless you wanted
to step outside of the standard layout. But the coolest thing about it
was the modular architecture which allowed you to plug in components
for new features. After buying one or two, I rapidly understood that
the modules were neither complex nor fully featured or documented.
I saw an opportunity and, after partnering up with my sister Jennifer,
we set out to convert Copernicus into a Miva Merchant after-market module
shop. We built, in my opinion, some of the most flexible, quality and well
designed and documented Miva Merchant modules at the time, from around 2001
to April of 2005. Apparently at that time Miva agreed, so we sold the Copernicus
module line to MIVA Inc., then owners of the Miva Merchant software package, and
I joined MIVA in San Diego as the director of software development.
The Copernicus modules lives on today, and several are still available
for Miva Merchant 4 and 5 including the Shipping SuperMod.
... continue to Part 2 ...
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