We’ve been concentrating so heavily keeping the A La Modern store and Etsy outlet humming along, that we haven’t really focused on some of the other aspects of the biz. Yep, it’s the dreaded “How Do You Get Customers To Come To Your Website”.
We’ll be the first to admit that publicity and “selling yourself” isn’t really our strong suit. We’ve got the technology and design aspect covered completely, but getting press is definitely something we need to work on in the future. However, we’ve gotten a few mentions around the old interweb – totally unsolicited, which are the best kind in our opinion.
A La Modern was profiled in the Six Revisions blog on a post called “Top 5 Excellent E-Commerce Plugins for WordPress“. Our shop is based on the excellent eShop Plugin.
This is actually the 2nd time we’ve been profiled for using eShop . My thought is that most folks setting it up don’t have an inhouse designer and aren’t selling vintage goodies. So, I think people just really like the design layout and functionality. We get people contacting us all of the time with questions on how we set up the shop plugin. It’s also very strange, but we get “uncompleted” orders occasionally – we’ve discovered people interested in the eshop plugin are “testing” it out on our site! Uh, we’ll take that as a compliment, I guess. =)
Ironically, we had to do a lot of customization to the theme and some behind the scenes programming to get eShop the way we wanted it. So, if you install it out-of-the-box, it’s not really going to look like our store (although, we’ve noticed with amusement that a lot of the original technology bits we created for it seem to be incorporated recently in upgrades to the plugin). In any case, we’ll take any publicity we can get – even if we’ve been having second thoughts about continuing to use the plugin. It’s just tough to keep up with the frequent updates.
Our Etsy store has also been receiving a fair amount of attention. That’s nice, since we originally created it as a social networking afterthought rather than a full fledged store.
Our Nordic Mint tray was featured on A Henny Penny’s Etsy Picks (note: the $16 price tag was for a special sale earlier, but the tray does book at over $40).
We’ve also been picked for Etsy Treasuries TEN times so far! While having an item featured on an Etsy Treasury might not seem like a big deal, it’s free publicity and nice sort of validation from your fellow vintage sellers. Some treasuries in which we were featured:
Vintage Wood Salt Pepper Shaker featured on “So Danish”
Arabia Egg Cups featured on “A Tribute to Sweden”
Vintage Folklore Tablecloth featured on “Folkloric Pleasures”
Orange and Red Napkin Rings featured on “The Modern Kitchen”. I think these were actually featured in three different treasuries.
We hope to get more yummy press like this in the future. We’re also looking into advertising opportunities on like-minded vintage modern websites (we’ve recently gotten ads going on H Is For Home and Dee9:14. Oh, if you run a vintage site, we’d love to exchange a link to your shop as well – just send us a note about it.
