Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Launching an E-commerce Business, and 10 Tips and Tricks to Make Your Life Easier

The following post is from Nancy McCarthy, a Blank Center team member.

Hanson Grant ’16 is founder of Think Board, a fall 2015 hatchery business (and 2015 MassChallenge finalist!), as well as a newly launched venture called Olive the Good Stuff. On December 1, Hanson shared his extensive knowledge at a peer to peer session hosted by the Butler Venture Accelerator Program in the Blank Center co-working space.  His topic was Launching an E-commerce Business, and 10 Tips and Tricks to Make Your Life Easier.

Think Board is a clear, dry erase sheet that can quickly and easily turn almost any flat surface into a creative workspace. This clear, reusable dry erase sheet adheres to almost any surface to create a “white board” for dry erase markers. Olive the Good Stuff are plant-derived soaps never tested on animals that have great, natural fragrances.  Hanson shared the knowledge of marketing and merchandising that he has accumulated while launching these businesses, by sharing a number of readily available web sources.

A few are:

  • Wix is a cloud-based web development platform that allows users to create web sites and mobile sites through the use of their online drag and drop tools. It’s easy to use, has great functionality and involves no coding.
  • A source of global ecommerce merchants, Shopify can help you create an online store or add e-commerce to an existing site or social media channel that customization and tracking capabilities.
  • Amazon Launchpad is a platform for hardware and physical goods startups to “launch, market and distribute” new products on Amazon.
  • Available on Google Chrome, SimilarWeb extension reveals site analytics data, including traffic and engagement statistics. Great for tracking your site data and those of your competitors.
  • MailChimp is an online email marketing solution to manage contacts, send emails and track results. Although similar to Constant Contact, MailChimp has an easy drag and drop designer to create a custom email for your company with a template reference to choose from.