Final Post

My entrepreneurship idea was initially about setting up an online shopping website for female college students in order to provide them with the affordable and chic design of the small accessories, such as earrings, bracelet and such. And I want to begin this business starting from Syracuse university and form a partnership with an physical factory as possible. I never get an insight to the idea of building up a business, so at first, the only thing I have in mind is just a website. However, after several weeks, I found my idea is developing and there will be much more aspects I need to think about before I say that is the end of business plan. 




From the first several weeks, I learned our website is supposed to use social media because our current goal is to run a business in Syracuse and the students are usually socially connected. In order to explore our market among the females, we have point- collecting and membership system to reward the social media users to show our brand and products they bought. Further, we should build up our own brand for the future development of our business, so the brand image is extremely important.  In order to make the most appropriate design to promote our products, Photoshop, Indesign is a must for us. And we can use this designs to advertise our brand as well.

In addition, I learned a lot from the competitive analysis, especially from the young brand Claire's branch company Icing, I have some basic knowledge of current fashion trends for the small accessories among the young adults from that website, and collect some basic designs in order to do the market research, in order to choose the most popular selling products for this range of age. Also, I know that the fashion website should be chic and simple, and the interface should be user- friendly, such as the categories should be clear on our website. As for Etsy, that website gave me more inspirational ideas on the promotion and how to sell the product more successfully.

After appreciating the competitor's hardship, I further developed the technical part of our business plan. As an online shopping website, the customers personal information is the key point for us to keep reliable and trustworthy. Therefore, we will protect privacy and safety of our customers in different ways. However, we are a local business so we recommend the customers can pay cash when the order is delivered. Furthermore, the operating system is the most essential part of our back-up. We have to operate a quick-speed and safe operating system, and if possible, we can ask professionals for help. Except that, open source online shop is another option for us, if we do not have much time to set up a mature system. Even though we build our website with strong hardwares, there are still some attacks from the outside.  Consequently, we are supposed to protect our computer from malware and ensure the security of our website. Cooperation with banks is the way we will do in order to fraud and personal information theft. Unauthorized access and use is prohibited and we will run operational check on our computers, encrypt with data and do all the routines to prevent the malware.




Since there is only one person involved to consider this business plan, so this plan is not completely perfect for sure, however,here is an outline of what I think our team should do to make this plan more mature:
- Choose a partner and begin to negotiate with them 
- Calculate our cost, including materials, labor and shipping, and develop the profit
- Do the market research and choose the right products
- Use the design softwares to create a brand image targeting the females including logo, ads, flyers, etc.
- Utilize the accessible and useful social media for college students and hire some females at first to promote
- Comparative Analysis
- Backstage Preparation:computers, operating system, and such
- Management of the personal information privacy and safety
- Development of the rules among the employees 

NO worrries about the security of your accounts!

 Entrepreneurship IDEA

  My goal is to set up a website providing online shopping for local female college student with small accessories such as earrings, bracelet, necklace and such. The key is to establish the fashion trend and have people know it.  As an online shopping website, we should be reliable.
Lecture post
  As we stress  it over and over again, we think it is extremely improtant to keep our customers feel safe and comfortable shopping on our webstie. It relates to the materials we covered this week in lecure, Cryptography, Malware and computer security.
  To protect the customers's personal account information, we will encrypt the information transferred via Internet, including the account number and account password our customers enter on our website, and also the payment infomation they provide. Except that,we could cooperate with the financial institutes and require digital signatures and digital certificates when our customers are using credit cards/ debit cards in order to decrease the risks of fraud and information theft.
  Besides that, we know we also face the security risks from other parties, including hackers nad corporate spy, unethical employees.  Consequently, we will constuct our web more effectively to protet our customers' rights. First, we will eliminate the unauthorized access and use on our computer, which is often the beginning of network information losses. In order to protect ourselves from the Internet and network attacks, we should be aware of the software and hardware during our website construction. Be careful of Denial of service attacks all the time and checking  the unusual visits should be included in our job routine. Plus, we are supposed to be carefull about the computer viruses, worms and trajan horses and add anivirus applications is a must. If any of them happen on our computer network, we will use quarantines in order to prevent from further destroyable damage of our information system. In order to prevent the attacks, we should also build our firewall firmly and suggest our customers open their firewall setting of their personal computers.

Operating system...

 Entrepreneurship IDEA

  My goal is to set up a website providing online shopping for local female college student with small accessories such as earrings, bracelet, necklace and such. The key is to establish the fashion trend and have people know it.  As an online shopping website, we should be reliable.


Lecture post

  The operating system will be really important if we want to build a safe website for our customers. To improve the computing system of our website, the stabilization of our server is extremely important because there will be increasing number of customers once we open the market. So not only should our operating system be secure, but also trusted and reliable.


  It is hard to design a operating system suitable for us, and we have to build a strong one to compute large data at one time for our online website. The operating system we will use is the, first,  has to handle multitask at the same time. Second, we must have the access control over components of the resource allocation ends, which means we have to know what is going on with our operating system and know how it allocates. Third, encryption for secure account number and password is a must for our operating system, especially for we as a E-commerce online shopping site. In addition, we can ask help for building a successful operating system from the expertise company and consultants.


  Open source online shop is also a solution for us if we do not have much time and resource to develop a new and mature system. For example, we can use osCommerce Online Merchant to setup, run and maintain the online shopping site.

Blog Review

 http://9to5mac.com/

      It is very exciting to read a blog about apple product with so much current and professional information, even though there a are tons of blogs and websites writing on Apple products. The well-known blog I am going to write about is 9 to 5 mac, and the blogger is 9 to 5 mac and he seems like a professional blogger for me though.

      His blog is basically about everything about Apple, the tips about using a Apple product, the new release IOS device, the apps we can use in the Apple store, all the things as long as you can imagine. If you are an apple savvy, then you can do a lot with the information on this blog.

      I have to say I love this blog, the design of this blog is so simple and easy for users to browse, because it is technology blog so the blogger put more emphasis on the information they give, instead of using a complex virtual design. The blog is well organized and easy to navigate. The information is useful and not boring. The blogger adds pictures in the proper position and makes it comfortable for your eyes. Also, there is a line of photos for preview to make them appealing for visitors, which is so important for visitors who want to catch the most important current issues happening around Apple.

       Overall, it is a great blog to keep up with Apple products and the blog is very nicely done with good expression!

Obsessed with Photoshop!

 Entrepreneurship IDEA

  My goal is to set up a website providing online shopping for local female college student with small accessories such as earrings, bracelet, necklace and such. The key is to establish the fashion trend and have people know it.  As an online shopping website, we should be reliable.

Lecture Post

  As a online shopping website, the most important way for promotion is trying to make the products as appealing as possible, and Photoshop is the most common tools to create the special design for businesses uses. We have to show the best details of our product, but sometimes the photos taken will not be in the best place or not in the best time. In those cases, in order to make use of those photos and not waste any other time and resources, it is better that we use Photoshop to add the special background and change the white balance to perfect the product display.

  Also, at the beginning of our website, we need flyers in order to improve the fame of our website, so we should use Photoshop to create our flyers to attract more female college students’ eyes. Even if we do not have too many Photoshop designers because of the starting period, we can use the templates available in the Photoshop and there are adequate amazing templates on the Internet we could use.

More importantly, we need a great and simple logo before we start our website in the purpose that college students can recall it easily and talk about it all the time. Also, Photoshop can fulfill the need, and we could design we logo as the way we like, and we can change the color and design as long as we like if we save it as a Photoshop document. If we want the logo really special, or we want to borrow others idea, we can add as much layers as we want, and change or delete them if we would like to.

  In conclusion, Photoshop is really good design tools for business purpose and we should not be afraid of using it!

What should I improve?? Just look at others!!

 Entrepreneurship IDEA

My goal is to set up a website providing online shopping for local female college student with small accessories such as earrings, bracelet, necklace and such. The key is to establish the fashion trend and have people know it.  As an online shopping website, we should be reliable.

Competitive Analysis

Competitor One

Icing

URL: http://www.icing.com/

A company doing the similar thing as I am trying to do is Claire’s.  They bring accessories and jewelry to girls and young women around the world, but most of their business stays in the United States. Their products are imported and their have more than thirty thousand physical stores around this country. Customers can buy earrings, necklaces, purses, hair accessories and other fashion accessories in the stores.  

Also, their developed a branch brand named Icing, which aimed at young adult from 19 to 28 and has a higher price and more mature design and this brand coincide the age for college students. In Icing, girls can buy the accessories listed before and other things, for example, candles, cosmetics and handbags. But they do not open the as many stores for Icing as they did with Claire’s, because they want customer to see Icing as a higher-level brand. Until now, Icing is not a online shopping website and they only have their store for customers want to buy their design. However, it is beneficial for me to look at their website because we have the same age coverage as their brand. The design for the website is chic and simple, which conveys the message that they want to stylize their brand. They have the “trend”, “must have” and “Beauty” sections on the front page, which uses different strategies to promote their new designs. Also, they provide the useful ear-piercing information for their customers as a little reminder for their careful and excellent service. They also provide the facebook and twitter share link for customers who want to share the chic Icing look with their friends. Overall, even though Icing do not provide the online shopping for their customers, a lot of details on their website remind me of the design of my website, and the design of their website give me a hint on my website, which is, we should really think from the customer’s side.

Competitor Two

Etsy

URL: http://www.etsy.com/

Despite Etsy is a platform for sellers to marketing for their own merchandises, and for shoppers to select their favorite design, this website gives me plenty of information on how to make simple goods more variable and appealing to customers. Etsy is a e-commerce website,  which concentrates on the handmade things and the things they cover is not limited in jewelry, and they includes clothing, beauty,etc. Anything handmade you want to sell, you can put it on a list. It is very similar to Ebay, but the goods there is more valuable and less seen. Because there are tons of sellers and everyone has their own promotion on the accessories, so I learned a lot of promoting skills on the website.  They also provide the community and blogs for the fashion savvies to communicate and create the trends, which is also useful in the creation of my website.

Safety is important!

Lecture Post

Entrepreneurship IDEA

My goal is to set up a website providing online shopping for local female college student with small accessories such as earrings, bracelet, necklace and such. The key is to establish the fashion trend and have people know it.  As an online shopping website, we should be reliable.

Lecture Post

   Computer forensics is important. Since the online shopping website aims at facilitating college students, the population who easily overlook the unsafe Internet and leak of their personal information, we pay more attention on the design of our website in terms of safety. Since our website is public, anyone can buy accessories online and use anyway they choose to pay for it, but we will recommend credit card. Also, we will email the customers before their purchases to remind them of the potential danger of the Internet shopping, and recommend them to check their credit report. We will have the “personal information alert” before the customer’s final order if they are using cards, and since we serve for local students, we suggest the customers to pay cash when the order is delivered.

   Except that, we will protect the customers’ s information as possible as we can. Operating the online shopping website is hard and protect the customers’ information is even harder. But at least, we should keep in mind the right way to write off costumers’ personal information on the hard drive.

    On the top of that, we need a excellent computer to back up our online shopping website, a good processor and enough amounts of memory to make the website operate smoothly and make sure the costumers don’t worry about the speed of website and shop without anxiety.