I’ve been quietly building a proper shop on my website. Not on Etsy, not on a separate platform, no percentage payable to any ghastly ecommerce platform – just here, on my own site, where everything else already lives.
When my father was a baby, my grandparents ran a shop. A sweet shop: people would come in and say hello. That’s not a bad model for selling things, and it’s roughly what I’m aiming for: you place an order, I get an email, I write to you, we sort it out. A little friction, a little contact, a little humanity.
The technical side has been genuinely interesting – I’m quite a nerd about this kind of thing. I’ve written about it on the blog for anyone who likes that sort of thing – and it’s nearly there. My aim is to have at least one item properly available for purchase in what clearly looks like a shop (not just a web page with a payment button) by the end of March.
More soon.
I’ve been writing in more detail about the technical side of setting up the shop – for nerdy friends who enjoy that sort of thing — starting here: A proper shop at last.