Love of turquoise necklace

At BluEarthJewelry.com we are not the only ones loving turquoise necklaces, aparantley more and more celebrities are wearing different styles of turquoise necklaces. From A listers like Cameron Diaz and Salma Hayek to ABC news anchor Liz Cho, all have been spotted wearing turquoise necklaces. And who can blame them, there is no surprise that so many people find turquoises’ unique and rich color irresistible.
Check out celebs’ turquoise necklaces as well as our turquoise necklaces at BluEarthJewelry.com

Not Just Another Plain Pearl Necklace

It’s been a while since the last post, our website is up and running, we don’t have many products yet but hopefully  enough to get people interested.

It was very exciting getting the necklaces for the store, I think they are absolutely wonderful. Since I am the buyer and I can proudly say have exceptional good taste, I simply chose necklaces that I would wear myself, plus I added couple of classics like black and white pearl necklaces.Even though I’m not a big fan of pearls I think no jewelry store should be without them. On the other hand you don’t have to be a pearl lover to enjoy our pearl necklaces. 

For our collection I was looking for something elegant and unique, I didn’t want your grandmas plain white pearl necklace (not that there’s anything wrong with it), so I came across coin pearls which are different but still classy. I especially love this necklace, it’s really amaizing how it shines in different colors. It is iridescent black and actually changes color depending on what color clothes you wear with it. It has sort of purple-green glow which is very cool.   I also found couple of beautiful multistrand freshwater pearl necklaces that I’ve included in the collection.

The Beginning

Hey everyone!
I am a Web Designer/Developer with over 8 years of experience in web technologies.
Not too long ago my wife and I decided that I was tired of working for others and as an alternative we set to start our own little family business. As for what to do to make tons of $$$ we decided that retail woull do for now. My wife always loved turquoise color and she decided that selling turquoise jewelry would be ideal for our hypothetical store.
I am going to document our attempt on the pages of this blog and offer my insight about the tools available out there to help you create a store of your own and help you run successfull business.
I will start with the choice of Hosted Shopping Cart provider.
During the years of professional experience I had worked with Volusion. They seem to have good features, somewhat easy to set up and maintain your store. But when it comes to customization, forget about it! They give no access to the code (even though it might not be an issue for an average user, it is huge draw-back for me). They won’t even provide tech support for built-in API. Oh, and their tech support guys don’t even know HTML! One of them admitted to me during a fierce phone conversation. Leave alone tech support, they charge astronomical sums of money for additional bandwidth. Giving you 1GB/month with a $30 plan and charging $5 for an additional gigabyte per month. Come on people, it’s 21st century. Does an additional gigabyte of monthly traffic cost $5? Any store that has adWord budget of $300 and more will end up using at least 3GB/month (if the site is not heavily loaded with graphics). And an average store will have over 30GB traffic per month. So the most basic plan at Volusion will actually cost you not $29.95 but double that amount, and you’ll only have 20 SKUs. Besides there is $99 setup fee. So Volusion was a definite NO for us. I turned to Google and searched for other solutions. As with everything GOOD=$$$, but then I found Shopify.com that defied the equation: Good can be cheap. Shopify.com’s plans were starting at $24.95. Along with Shopify.com I came across BigCartel.com that was even cheaper starting at 10$. I opened free trial accounts on both of the sites and immersed myself into testing. It didn’t take me too long to decide to go with Shopify.com because BigCartel.com would not support more than 100 SKU, not now, not in the nearest future.
After spending more time with Shopify.com’s trial account I’m liking it. Even though it doesn’t offer a lot advanced features that Volusion offers, Shopify.com still has it’s own advantages over other hosted shopping cart solutions: It’s very clean (code-wise), very search-engine friendly, allows you to customize most of the web-site (knowledge of HTML and CSS is required), offers pre-designed themes for those whe don’t have HTML/CSS knowledge, plus they offer customized billing plans.