** My first failed eStore in USA: DelongArt.com. **

(DelongArt.com was hosted on Yahoo!Store.  It was closed by me only one step before its open to the public.  How sad to do that!!  I am still the owner of the website address (for one year after registration).)

(Click on the picture to see the demo of my dead dotcom!!)

(Since this store is for demo only, I've removed the links for pictures!!)

**(If you are not interested in the story at the following paragraphs, please skip them!!)**

This store was designed to sell sculpture according to our cutomers' pictures.  Each of our product would be customized for every unique client.

The story began since when I found a talented artist, Delong, who is from Tienjing, China and new to USA.  He definitely can do sculpturing very good and very fast.  Can you image he can sculpture your face in front of you in about 15 to 20 minutes, and let you surprise its similarity to you.

I went to his home and asked for doing a few small test, sculpturing my friends according to their pictures.  Of course, I paid him for those tests.  The result was satisfied, except the delayed schedule.  Later, I asked for his interest to pursue a joint venture that he and I formed a dotcom doing business of custom (定作的) sculpture.  The basic idea was we took orders from our website (also from local cooperated displayed points of stores) and did sculpturing for our customers according to their uploading pictures or mailed pictures, and then sent back our finished work back to them.

We started our preparation after we reached our agreement that I invested ten to twenty thousands of US dollars and responsible for all of business aspects except his responsibility of production.

We worked first on the sculpture samples like those you can see from the link above.  I turned to ask help from my roommate in Northwestern University, John (Min-John Lee, also from Taiwan, now works for Dell in Austin, USA).  We spent one week on the building of our website, DelongArt.com.  It could be finished in a so short time because we already studied all solutions for web store hosting a long time before!!  I did a project, StudentHere.com (Aimed to the grocery market for international students and new immigrants.), for one of my courses, Technical Entrepreneurship, before this time.  The study was done then.  Yahoo!Store was the best solution I figured out at that time, since we needed a reliable, fast host, and enough space for storing uploading pictures and allowing some function like uploading pictures, automatic response of order confirmation and customer complaints.

I also went to file a business name for our company.  We almost finished everything for our start-up except I missed calculating human's dark side, my partner's greedy and selfish mind.  He didn't want to corporate but asking for a lot of benefits for himself.  He viewed his family business at the first rank, then our partnership.  My God!!  How regretful I decided to stop the development of our business just only one step to face the public- application for the online transaction account.  We closed our company after I invested about four thousand US dollars and three months.

I still think it is a very good experience and lesson to me.  The decision to close before continually losing money and wasting my time.

The store could be successful if we could work very hard together!!  Moreover, I still believe the idea could work and be promising, though not making big bucks, but earning enough capital for both of us for future career and lives.  Anyway, it's dead!!  My partner still performed as a street artist and made a comparably lower amount of money than what we estimated for our partnered business.  God bless him!!