Adafruit do wonderful work. Giving back to the community is always appreciated and I only hope I can live up to the standard they are setting.
As a for instance, Adafruit put out a “zencart day” blog post where they talk about improvements they’ve made to their default install and offer it up to anyone else. What a time saver!
… except it doesn’t work out of the box. The plugin didn’t understand that I had a database prefix. It couldn’t load product images in the appropriate places or display “no image found” when needed. It wanted a Google CDN key and (as far as I can tell) Google doesn’t even offer CDN keys any more. The documentation said “remove these three sections if you aren’t using this other plugin” and it failed to mention there were another four sections that had to be removed. It isn’t nice to bite the hand that feeds you, so rather than complain to Adafruit I’m publishing my fixes here, just as they would have done.
Starting a maker business is not easy. There are so many things to think about before you can put your product up for sale. How do you find the best components for your kit? How do you set up an online store? What is the best way to ship out your product? How much should you charge for your kit at wholesales? What about retail? How much inventory should you keep stocked? What tools are available to run a more efficient business? These are just a few of many questions you should ask yourself before putting your product up for sale. As you can see, it can all be very overwhelming.
Thankfully, Adafruit is here to help. When I started up Coobro Labs, and began getting the Coobro Geo kit ready to sell, I constantly tapped into the resources here at Adafruit. These tips, tutorials, and articles saved me a whole lot of headache. They enabled me to distribute my kit efficiently, and sell it for a profit.
Here is a quick overview of the types of posts you will find in the Maker Business section at Adafruit:
Sure, you could send out your circuit boards to be manufactured by a third party, but if you aren’t ordering in large quantities, this will dramatically increase the cost of your kit, eat in to your profits, or both. Manufacturing Monday posts help to teach you how to manufacture your boards, and assembly your kits at home.
There are a couple great things you will find in the Tutorial Tuesday posts. You will, or course, find tips and tricks for running your own maker business (such as a tutorial on using barcode scanners, tips on using pick & place machines). You should also take time to go over the way Adafruit tutorials are set up and written for Adafruit products. Making sure you have extremely detailed tutorials for your product is very important. The better your tutorial, the happier your customer will be, and the happier you will be because you won’t have to spend all night answering customer support emails.
Without a doubt, the hardest part of getting your maker business up and running is building your online store. Thankfully, there is open source Zencart ecommerce software. The Adafruit store is built with Zencart. Over the years, Adafruit has tweaked, modded and improved Zencart. The beauty of using Zencart is that it is open source, and Zencart Zensday is where we share those tips, tricks, and mods with you. Learn how to tweak your storefront, manipulate invoices, make your store iOS friendly, and much much more.
Another important part of selling a kit is making sure you source quality components. When I was just getting into electronics, and designing my own kits, one of they more frustrating things was navigating Digikey and Mouser to find the right components. Ladyada recognized this issue, and created the Adafruit Partfinder. Ladyada is extremely picky about which components go into the Partfinder, and only components of the highest quality make the cut. This was an extremely useful tool early on, as it made me confident I was ordering the one right component out of thousands of available options.
There are also a lot of general maker business posts that don’t fit into these categories. So, if you want to read all of the Maker Business blog posts, click here, or subscribe to the Maker Business RSS feed.
ZENCART ZENSDAY – HTML 5 / iOS-friendly forms. Make your site more mobile-friendly. When we improve our site, we share how we do it and release some code with our weekly ZENCART ZENSDAY! This mod will change all of your email fields from type=”text” to type=”email” where necessary. This will make it easier for people with iPads and mobile devices to type their email addresses into the field, and will gracefully degrade to type=”text” in browsers that do not support HTML 5. This came in by suggestion of a customer and within 24 hours, we rolled this out – thanks Brooke!
A while back I was bored and wanted to take a look at the gRaphael JS library, so I made a quick dot chart of our order totals by day of the week. Here it is!
You’ll need to download both the gRaphael library and the dot graph library both from the graphael website and place them in the admin/includes/javascript directory. Our file uses the non-minified version of the dot library, use the minified version if you want to save bandwidth.
ZENCART ZENSDAY! – Shorten & Prettify URLs. This mod will re-write your urls to look nice and pretty! There’s several plugins that SEO your urls for you like this one but they all seemed pretty complicated so we wrote our own.
Zencart’s inventory management is bulky and can sometimes take way too long to do really simple things – like changing the stock of many items at once.
To fix this, we’ve made an admin page calles easy_update.php that can do lots of stock changes at once, as well as organize products by stock, ordered but not shipped, and # of people subscribed. This is our daily go-to for the store inventory ‘health’ – letting us know whats the most important thing to get back into stock at a glance
Some of the people and companies that make/ship/kits and even compete with us, think we’re crazy for giving away core parts of our business like this. Easy Update is one of those – enjoy, go make an amazing open-source hardware business folks
Adafruit posts some Zencart zennieness every week. Here’s our first humble mod of the popular online store software.
Soon one or two popular PCBs will be available for a couple bucks from the PCB drawer. This is just a test, we don’t plan to go into the retail business.
We need a way to stop people from purchasing free prototype PCBs. It’s not that we don’t want to sell you prototype PCBs too, the logistics are just impossible though. Our first Zencart MOD limits PayPal payments to the for-sale boards, and keeps the prototype boards available via free PCB coupon only.
ZENCART ZENSDAY – Predictive inventory. Ok, folks this is likely one of the most useful parts of our Adafruit business we’re thrilled to share with the world… One of the ‘brick walls’ that any business eventually hits is how to manage inventory. If you’re a one person shop and you have 10 items to keep track of, you can probably do it all in your head. But once you get to 25 or so items it can get really messy. That’s why a few years ago we wrote up our own ‘predictive’ inventory system. Now to make it absolutely clear, this php code cannot actually see into the future. However, it can look into the past and make a good educated guess about how long your inventory will last assuming you have pretty steady purchasing history.
Basically, this code will look at all your product categories and items and sum up how many orders were placed for these items. Then it puts them in a table with the current inventory/stock. The table entries have a background of light red if your current inventory will run out before then. For example lets look at this screenshot:
If the future purchasing is like the past, then we’ll run out of 9V regulated adapters in about 4-6 weeks. If you know the approximate lead time for stuff you buy then you can just keep ordering just when the ‘red bars’ start showing up too much!
Many people ask what we use for our shipping system (We use Endicia for postage services) but there are other options, a maker posted in our forums asking about Endicia vs Stamps.com and very quickly Eric from Stamps.com joined in and is answering questions!
So! Post up in the forums if you’d like to learn more about their services – they are answering questions! This is the future folks! Companies participating directly with prospective new customers in forums like ours!
ZenCart Zensday – Text box length limits! Each week share different parts of our shopping cart system many use these in their own “Adafruit” like kit businesses. This week… Here’s a quick way to limit the length of customer comments on your invoices using javascript. Essentially, this is just a script to limit the size of a textarea element. This can be handy when you need to make sure a text field doesn’t have too much text in it…
We sell very technical things and we often have a lot of stuff we want to add to the product page – technical details like size & weight, electronic details for interfacing, datasheets, example code, schematics, files, tutorials, etc. Before you know it, customers are inundated with too much info! That’s why tabs can be very handy, they are easy to use and split up the information into chunks by category!
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