I didn't think starting a webshop would be this easy

2023-12-01 20:11:00

A few weeks ago my company become official Delivery Partner of CompTIA's, which means that I can now officially also teach classes on their behalf. I've already taught Linux+ for a few years, at ITVitae, but that's using my own materials and the Bresnahan/Blum book.

One other benefit to this partner status, is that we can purchase exam vouchers at a 20% discount. In this, I see the opportunity to help struggling newbies who want to break into IT, even if it's just a little. 

In my life, I've was helped by a great number of people and thus I firmly believe in "lifting up" and in "paying it forward". If I can take a small financial hit, in order to help people take their exams at a cheaper rate, I'll gladly do it. 

Having no prior experience in running a webshop (aside from a few internship projects 25 years ago!), I looked for the nicest-yet-low-barrier solution. 

The Unixerius site is built using Rapidweaver, a MacOS WYSIWYG editor which has made it very easy to quickly whip up a decent looking site. I spent about an hour research options of affordable webshops, only to be happily surprised by Ecwid.

Ecwid are a webshop SaaS provider who offer a full frontend + backend system. They integrate with the payment providers I would need for the European market (Paypal, SEPA and Stripe, which offers iDeal). Their management system is excellent. And their frontend nativel integrates with Rapidweaver. 

It took me roughly three hours to set everything up, from A to Z. And it all works very well, I was my own first customer by test-purchasing an ITF+ voucher.

I will not be doing any big marketing for this shop. It's intended to be a small way to help out struggling students. I'm not looking to piss off the big CompTIA partners by severly undercutting them on large amounts of sales. 

Heck, I'm restricting voucher purchases to one-per-person, to prevent pissing off CompTIA themselves. :)


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