As an artist
An order came in through the shop from a buyer a long way outside Yorkshire. Someone I had never met bought one of my collages from a part of the country my gallery sales had never reached. No gallery took a commission. No marketplace took a fee. The money went through Stripe, the print went in the post, and that was that.
The client is me
This case study is about how that shop got built. The client, for once, was me.
I am a collage artist as well as a web designer. The two rarely intersect. I make collages from old engravings, botanical plates and scientific diagrams, and I sell prints of the work. For years that meant galleries, like the Mercer in Harrogate.
August 2020
The situation
Galleries are good to work with, but they have limits. They reach the people who walk through the door and nobody else. They take a commission on every sale. And your work hangs alongside everyone else's, which means it never quite stands on its own.
I wanted a destination of my own. A place where the work is not diluted by other artists, where it stands or falls on its own merit, and where nobody takes a cut.
Why not Etsy?
I could have opened an Etsy shop in an afternoon. But a marketplace is just a gallery with worse lighting. You pay fees on every sale, you compete for attention with thousands of other sellers, and you build your audience on land you do not own.
I already had a website. Bolting a shop onto it was the natural move. Full control, no ongoing fees, and every visitor sees my work and nothing else.
What I built
The shop runs on WooCommerce, added to my existing WordPress site. Payments go through Stripe. The product images are low resolution scans of the collages, clear enough to sell the work, small enough to load fast and discourage copying.
The most important design decision was the typography. My collages are strange on purpose. The buying process cannot be. I set the shop in NaN Spaceland and Inter, chosen to be clear, readable and businesslike, so there is no doubt about anything at the point where someone spends money. Prices, shipping, the buy button. All of it plain.
That is a rule I apply to every client shop too. The brand can have as much character as you like. The checkout needs to feel like a checkout.
The result
The shop sells prints at £45, at a price I have finally settled on, to buyers well outside Yorkshire. That is the thing a gallery could never give me. The Mercer reaches Harrogate. The shop reaches anywhere.
What I would do differently
Fix the pricing sooner. I was all over the place at first. Too expensive, then too cheap, then somewhere in between. It took real orders, and real silence, to find the price that felt right to buyers and fair to me. If I built it again I would research pricing properly before launch instead of treating it as something to sort out later.
Most first time shop owners make the same mistake. Now, when a client asks me what to charge, I can answer from experience rather than theory.
What this means for your business
If you already have a website, you are closer to selling online than you think. A shop can bolt straight onto it. No marketplace fees, no competing for attention, and the whole buying experience under your control.
The one thing it has to be is professional. People will forgive a quirky brand. They will not forgive a confusing checkout. Get the buying process clear and trustworthy, and the rest of the site can be as strange as you like.
Thinking about adding a shop to your website? Get in touch and we can have a conversation.
eCommerce Websites Built in Harrogate, North Yorkshire
This project is one example of the eCommerce websites I build with WordPress and WooCommerce. A good online shop makes buying easy, from the first product page to the final click at checkout. You can read more about my eCommerce services or tell me about your project.