The world of E-Business

15.12.2015 Education, Projects, Student Life

Can you imagine a world without online shopping? Without nice pictures in the store and an awesome design?

Nowadays you can find everything online from clothes to diapers and order it 24/7, which is quite awesome. Even better in this case is that we have a course at Arcada, which teaches you how to build your own webstore!

You think now: “My own webstore? Really? I am sure we need to sell products we do not like.”

It is definitely not like that. The whole course is based on your own decisions, which some people like and some don’t. Me and my group for example were at our first meeting completely overwhelmed by finding a business idea or even a company name, but at the end we managed to create BabyBay (External link).

Like the name already says we have something to do with babies, specifically we sell daily baby equipment like food, diapers and wipes. Don’t asked how we came to that idea or the business name. It was a long process, but really much fun.

Now that you maybe already have your business idea, how would you learn to build a webstore? Isn’t that too much work for a one period course at Arcada?

It is for sure much work to build your own webstore, but because you chose something you like it is fun at the same time. Every week you have a deadline, where you just hand in screenshots of your store and some short notes. Really easy going! Furthermore you can decide everything on your own. How much prices are, which payment system you use and so on. Furthermore there are going to be some lectures, where Mikael Forsström, the teacher of this course, helps you in decision making and is just around to advice you. He will not tell you what to do and how to do it. You have to figure it out yourself, but if you are really stuck and have a problem he will help you fix it.

I know that many of us do not have the motivation to keep doing stuff on for more than two weeks. Mikael Forsström found also for that the perfect solution: “Go Live”.

“Go Live” is an event, where all the webstores are presented like on a real start-up event, where they are searching for investors. It means that special functions, ideas and the webstore itself gets presented in five minutes. Furthermore you need to create your own advertisement (here you find ours (External link)) for the store and show it to the class. Some presentations and videos are really funny and some are strange. You see what your competing groups have created on all these weeks and compare to each other. At the end you are going to vote, which store is the best and the winners get glory and fame four the rest of the course.

In the 2015 competition there were many really good web stores and it was hard to decide who to vote. At the end Babybay did not reach a place on the steps, but for that these three stores got best placements:

All of the nominees have been awesome stores, as you can see on your own. Eatme Cookies is a store, where you can order all kinds of different cookies and they will come in two days to your home. Furthermore FurnitureRent is a store for exchange student, who would not like to buy furniture in a foreign country and just want to rent it for a small amount of money every month until they go back home.

Our winner this year was LATA. The store had a really good fashioned video and is selling sport clothes. The question how their success feels the LATA-team answered simply “Feels awesome!!” with a huge smile on their faces.

I would recommend to everyone who wants to work with a good teacher and gain awesome experience (fame and glory at the end of the course included) should sign up for the next e-business and distribution course. You will not regret it.

Your BabyBay-Team