As an individual Ben is always looking to improve things, and one of his strong suits is being resourceful in finding and staying on top of the latest technologies in WordPress and WooCommerce. Ever since he got into WooCommerce he’s wanted to created his own ecommerce store to sell product but he didn’t know what product he wanted to sell. By this time he had created the Coronado Surf Designs brand identity because he was going to start a surfboard company with a surfboard maker but that didn’t work out. Then he came across Printful.

He noticed Printful and their use of the digital printing technology called “direct to garment” through browsing the internet. They have a plugin that allows for slick white-label integration with WooCommerce and it got him very excited because he had already gone through all of the steps of creating a company and branding identity for Coronado Surf Designs. So it was a perfect match to repurpose Coronado Surf Designs into an apparel and clothing company since that is the product Printful offers. He initially built CSD with a builder framework and learned through that process that he didn’t like that framework, and decided to rebuild it for the Printful integration with a Genesis Framework child theme and WooCommerce, a combination that is very solid and dependable.

He didn’t expect that all to happen, and now he has an eCommerce store that is a business that far exceeds what he thought he might be getting himself into. See, what is nice about Printful and how it is set up is that he doesn’t have to carry any wholesale goods—they take care of all of that and so much more. This leaves him with a lot less to stress about and more time to design, develop and market with his website, which is just what he wants to be doing with a small business like this. Due to all of the wonderful integrations with WooCommerce he can run the business and handle any of his other work. Because he’s using such great web products, made a great choice in names, created sound information architecture, and is using good keywording for strong SEO, his page ranking in search engines is excellent in such a competitive market. The benefits of learning through firsthand experience with an eCommerce business with extremely low overhead is incredible. Because of CSD’s page rank visibility and social media sharing, it caught the attention of the Coronado Historical Association who now features Coronado Surf Designs apparel and clothing in their retail store section of the museum, a wonderful result he is very grateful for.