We have talked about selling “online” for a long time. Recently we were faced with changes on how our items currently sell which was 95% at a vintage market and the balance thru Roie’s different social or interest groups. Covid-19 changed everything. Unfortunately the beautiful vintage market we sold at is in the process of changing their business model and will close the brick and mortar portion of their business. Without this outlet for our items we now need to change our business as well. We will try our hand at e-commerce and see if there is a market. It’s not like we are selling something easily packed and shipped so pickup needs to be the method of getting an item to the new owner.
Flash back two years when we decided to jump in the deep end and have our own website. That’s when the reality of HOW to do it sets in. Neither of us are “code” people so it was imperative to have the heavy lifting already in place. Now anyone can pay to have a website designed and developed but we couldn’t justify the $ for our type of business. Enter WordPress.org. My limited understanding is this is all open source content for people like us up to professionals who want to design a website. This was where we started.
Many of the basics to developing the website were easily setup. Having the website actually look like something was not that easy. Finally a web search (can’t count the hours) found what I was looking for. A tutorial walk-thru from start to finish. Think classroom. Here it is: https://colormelon.com/free-portfolio-website-tutorial/ . I can’t tell you what a life saver this tutorial turned out to be. I followed along in a separate browser window completing the instructions as I went. Unbelievable. A couple of hours later we had a website. Thank you Colormelon.
Now we had a website. We added some images and I actually wrote a couple of Blog posts. A writer I am not. English was not my strong suit in grade school so writing is painstakingly long and tedious process. That was in mid 2018. “We need to breath some new life into our website” was declared every month since. Covid-19 happens and we HAVE to breath some life into our website AND create an e-commerce Store.
Looked for a e-commerce Plugin and found Ecwid. It had great reviews and I’ve found you can activate a plugin from your WordPress Dashboard, set it up and deactivate or delete it very easily giving you the opportunity to see it Live without much hassle at all. Once Ecwid was setup it provided everything we needed in a usable and attractive Store package integrated directly into our website. Love it.
Another thing I love about WordPress.org is the ease at which you can change “Themes”. Themes are the base look, feel and presentation of your websites content. The way the page looks, the header, your images, etc. Because of some issues with our original theme we switched to the current one, Poseidon by ThemeZee. To change to it took all of 5 seconds. Previewed the theme, played around looking at our website using this new one and decided to Publish. Mouse click. Done. The sweet thing about this is it’s that easy to change themes. If you come across one you like better. Click. Done. Your content just goes along for the ride.
I will post again about our Store once we see some activity. If the next post is dated two years from now, well that answers that.
Here are a few things posted to the Store…
$280 
$220 
$225 
$250 
$340 
$185 
$240 
$130 
$180 
$235 
$275 
$390 
$320 
$335