“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
All good stories have to start somewhere.
Fortunately, your eCommerce story is not nearly as complicated to understand as the ins and outs of the Galactic Empire. Thank the stars!
Building, or perhaps rebuilding, an eCommerce website can be a daunting task no matter how you slice it, so how about we start at the beginning and have some fun while we’re at it?
Building Your Dream Can Become a Nightmare
Enter Nigel Leggemen, our intrepid explorer! His story is filled with misadventures, so yours doesn’t need to be.
Nigel may be an explorer but he is also a great teacher, or maybe just an object lesson?
Excited to begin his first adventure, Nigel was eager to get started exploring and confident in his abilities, so he chose to build his DreamRover® on his own. He had some skills and know-how, after all, so he jumped in and got to work.
The realization hit, not-so-quickly, that he was not making great progress.
Maybe he didn’t choose the best rover. Did he even shop around at all? Didn’t he compare the models to learn which would best meet his needs? Who knows. Don’t make Nigel’s mistake of not comparing, learning, and shopping around. Check out this kit we created for you to compare platforms for B2B eCommerce before you spend any money on one.
After many hours (maybe even weeks or months) spent on its construction, Nigel had a grand reveal of his DreamRover®. Unfortunately, he realized it didn’t actually work. 
He didn’t use his manual, then LOST the manual and then just decided to keep going.
While we admire his tenacity, Nigel’s misadventure could have been avoided if he knew what he was getting into in the first place. He could have saved himself so much building time, 97.254 hours to be precise, and probably a lot of headaches and delays to his explorations. As it stands, he now needed to find some help.
At Brilliance Business Solutions, we encourage potential clients to hire us to create a project scope before starting on a large project. If Nigel had scoped out his project ahead of time, he would have anticipated the amount of time, availability of resources, and potential challenges, eliminating a lot of headaches!
Nigel found a bit of relief when he was able to contact the DreamRover® Technical Support Team. 
He had a lovely and painless chat with a knowledgeable individual who was quickly able to assist him with his issue of the lost manual.
Live Chat is a great tool to include on an eCommerce website (check out this article on eCommerce integrations), but the more important lesson here is to buck up and ask for help from professionals.
There may not be a manual, per se, for your specific situation but professionals with diverse experiences have likely seen it all and are sure to have some ideas to share.
Ah! The end is near! Well, of Chapter One anyway. Nigel got his DreamRover® rebuilt according to the manufacturer’s instructions and he was rarin’ to go!
He felt good about the work he did but finally realized how much time he would have saved if he’d just followed the manual the first time, 42.567 hours to be precise. 
Oh well. That’s behind him now and he has his adventure to go on.
Launch Day truly is a big day for everyone, but it’s not the end of the story. It’s really just the beginning. When filling out your team, you should find developers who are going to stick with you after launch to quickly work out inevitable kinks and support the maintenance of your site (or be ready to train and hand-off that responsibility to whomever you choose). At Brilliance, we have opinions about both what happens after your eCommerce site goes live as well as how to properly maintain your eCommerce website.
We’ve had a lot of fun creating Nigel’s story. We’re glad his misadventures can be teachable moments, and hopefully, Nigel learned some lessons too. And since we ARE professionals, we hope you’ll ask for help when you’re ready with a free consultation.
Stay tuned for the lessons Nigel teaches us in Chapter 2…
