New tack shop - would love your opinions

[AKB]

I would like to be able to buy items that can be custom sized. My Irish Draught wears oversized bridles, but often the nose bands are too small. Finding an attractive bridle with a big enough noseband and and a little bling on the browband was difficult. My daughter has an Irish Draught Sport Horse. He is wearing parts from two different bridles.

I would like an attractive, reflective, high visibility, correction saddle pad with shims and a small pocket for carrying a small bottle of water.

I would like highly effective products. My horse broke two hay slow feeders before I found the Porta Grazer. I looked for months before I found a waterproof hay bag that holds 5 bales of hay in the bed of my pickup truck. Several sets of hay bags have developed holes and tears after minimal use in my trailer. Products that break easily are very annoying.

If you do the research on highly effective products, you don’t have to keep them in stock. If I can order those products through your website, you will get some of the profit.

[Bluey]

Don’t use the word “pony” to mean “horse”.

Some people are literally minded and just won’t even want to click on something called pony if they have horses.

Even on forums, some won’t open a thread about “my pony” this and that, thinking it is only about ponies, when the OP was talking about her horse after all.

[mjs8]

I actually like your COTH name - I’d shop there, sounds fun! =)

[tangledweb]

My requests:
Middle of the road quality at middle of the road prices. Everywhere stocks Chinese junk priced between cheap and medium. A few places stock really well known, premium European brands at premium prices. Europe is full of reasonable quality brands at reasonable prices. I don’t want $500 Pikeur breeches, but I don’t want single use items made by somebody who saw a picture of horse once either.

Be explicit about whether you have it in stock and how long it will take to deliver. Amazon has spoiled me. The first time it turns out you are just drop shipping stuff and it might take between 14 days and forever to get my item I’m gone never to return.

Good photographs of items. Not a blurry 2" photo of a model wearing it.

Size charts of items (not just clothing, saddle pads, bridles and lots of things vary).

Country of origin listed for items. “Imported” tells me nothing useful.

Name … meh I don’t care. But pick something short (two words) and easy to spell where the domain name is available without abbreviations or dashes.

[Arabiandressage]

I don’t know where you are located but if you are in Florida or California my advice would be don’t. You are wasting your time and money in an overly saturated market. Second, if you are doing ecommerce, price rules all so unless you have several 100’s of thousands of dollars it takes to stock an online store and negotiate prices you will not be competitive. Finally, you mention Eskadron…they alone have an opening order of $10,000, can you afford that to just get polo wraps? Also ecommerce is expensive, people think you just throw up a site and people will come. It doesn’t work that way and things like site security and keeping your site constantly optimized is EXPENSIVE. I have watched more than my share of people who just love horses crash and burn and loose A LOT of money. I have had horse my whole life, I also held several careers in various stages of the industry and got college educated specifically to do this kind of work…and I can tell you, you will need a solid business education and marketing education and really know horses and horse people. I am trying to be honest with you as this is not an easy industry, while we have been successful, I can tell you I easily pull 16 hour days and while I love every minute of it…it is WORK. If you decide to proceed, contact me in a year so you can tell me I was right lol!