So, one of the things we mentioned in our first post is that we’re going to try and be fairly transparent with the way that things work for the online vintage and antique business we’re starting up.

I guess the first thing to talk about as far as the web aspect goes is the platform we’re using. In deciding which route to go for the online shop, we knew that we wanted to have at least part of the store be completely under our control.

Don’t get us wrong, Etsy is really great – it’s difficult to beat the social network aspect as well. We were definitely torn between the strong social network factor (plus the ease of use with shipping and shopping cart) and the flexibility of having complete control over the look and feel of the store. Oh, and of course, NO FEES. We’re still going to have an Etsy storefront component to the business. However, we decided to strike out on our own for the main storefront. For now, anyhow – who knows, maybe we’ll switch to using Etsy for a larger part of the shop in the future depending on how everything works out.

Having used the open source WordPress platform extensively since early 2003, we thought it might be possible to combine the blogging aspect with a shop functionality. Most shops nowadays have some sort of blog – we figured it could kill two birds with one stone to use wordpress for its blogging component AND as a CMS (content management system), with a sessions based shopping cart thrown in.

The missing piece that provided the glue for those two parts was the Eshop Plugin.

First off, I have to say that if you don’t have any experience with programming (especially HTML, CSS and PHP), then this probably isn’t the route you want to go – unless you want to pay someone to set it up for you. We just happened to have the specific skillset necessary to set this up. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth mentioning that it’s a pretty darn good plugin. There are many other shopping cart plugins for WordPress, but we decided on this one, because it was free, and because it was easier to understand than some of the others.

So currently, the shop website is running on a custom WordPress theme with the Eshop Plugin providing help for the product pages. We disabled or ignored about 3/4 of the “easy” features that Eshop provides, because it didn’t suit our needs. One other note – Eshop is primarily meant for a shop with only a few products (think someone selling T-shirts, or downloadable E-Books). It is actually NOT ideal for a shop selling one-of-a-kind items like we are. However, we just really liked the way the plugin handled everything, and we were able to use heavily customied CSS and our own PHP hacking in our theme to make it look OK.

I’m not going to get to far into the details of how it’s setup in this particular post. If the above makes completely no sense to you, but you’re still interested in having your “own” shop (and you don’t want to pay people to program one for you), I would suggest you start out first with an Etsy shop and then try and fool around with the WordPress platform in your spare time. WordPress is free, assuming you have your own hosting account that supports MySQL databases.

However, if anyone’s interested in what our current setup involves, we’d be happy to answer any questions about it. And we might go further into depth about how the technial side of how the shop is set up in the future, if there’s interest.