Afternoon All,

 

I just wanted your opinions or experience of what route is best to go down for a "etsy style" site? Currently we have a website up and running which allows artists to showcase their artwork etc (using WP) We charge each artists a yearly fee to have a profile along with their contact details listed on the site.

 

This year we would like to take it to the next level by allowing artists to sell their work via the website but reading a few posts in google it does seem like it would get very complicated.

 

So just wanted to know if anyone on here has any advice they could give me or any experience with this path way. Would it best best to keep the shop separate or is there any WordPress plugins that could achieve this? (although I cant find much on it) Also as it would be a small operation to start with it doesn't seem worth paying for some of the bigger players solutions.

 

Thanks for reading.

Edited January 2, 201412 yr by 1clickweb

Yes you're right this sort of thing can get very complicated!

 

Some possibilities:

 

http://www.pixaria.com/gallery/

- purpose built system for showcasing and selling digital content

- can accept items from contributors (artists) but you would have to reconcile orders yourself

 

http://www.cs-cart.com/multivendor.html

- purpose built multi vendor shopping cart

- each user has their own login to add products and prices etc

- tracks sales per user (useful when reconciling)

 

http://www.ktools.net/photostore

- purpose built system for showcasing and selling digital content

- has an addon to allow for contributors, and tracks sales per user

 

The biggest issue with multi vendor sites is that a customer can order multiple items from multiple artists in one order, so you will need to reconcile commissions/payments yourself, say weekly or monthly.

Thanks for your really much appreciated. The CS-Cart option doesn't look to bad although we would need to get a few orders before we seen any return but I guess we would charge for the initial setup of the shop. Like you say the problem is the commission sides of things. I wounder if it would be better to just setup one shop where I add all the products and forward on the orders / payments to artists but then again I guess that would also get complicated and require a lot of work my end of things.

 

I will read up the CS-Cart option and look into other possible ways of doing it. Thanks for your help

Any ecommerce venture has startup costs so that always needs factoring into your business plan, it's not uncommon to allow 6-12 months before you start to break even.

 

You could indeed start off by you adding products on behalf of your customers, though that's probably not as attractive as do it yourself. I'm not certain but CS-Cart standard may have an upgrade path so you could upgrade a normal show to multi vendor at a later date.

 

So long as each item was tagged with an ID for the artist/seller you would be able to export sales data into a spreadsheet and filter by artist to get their sales totals.

Yea I understand like you say there is always a start up cost but I will need to continue doing my homework to see if it's better to pay a one of fee or a yearly one like CS-Cart charges.

 

It's defiantly an option to think about going down the one shop route. Normally I setup shops for individuals who already have a products and they do it all themselves but never gone down the route of being a middleman so to speak, so not sure which direction is wise to head in.

 

I did find a wooCommerce extension which look interesting: http://www.woothemes.com/products/product-vendors/

Edited January 2, 201412 yr by 1clickweb

We have once created such website which was marketplace for fashion designers it was multi vendor support system . The platform we used cs -cart and rest frameworks are not function properly.

We have once created such website which was marketplace for fashion designers it was multi vendor support system . The platform we used cs -cart and rest frameworks are not function properly.

Yea I did look at the CS-Cart option and it definitely is one, I'm currently finding out how much interest there is from the artists (which is positive at the moment) but also got to see if the $590 per year will be worth it.

I like the idea, there are not enough outlets for artist's online. There are some security issues you will need to address though, licencing of the digital media as artist's are funny about people being able to pay once and reproduce at will, files that are downloaded will need some kind of security metadata to protect copyrights, and any example images displayed will need protecting from the right click as well.

 

Many artist's avoid advertising their artwork online for these reason's, they fell it is to easy to be ripped off; Myself included -

 

 

If you got that lot properly sorted it would be a strong marketing point for your site within the artist community though!

Edited January 8, 201412 yr by Weedy101

Thanks Weedy101 the issues is something I may have to look into but most of the artists just sell the original painting not prints so there would be nothing available to download etc Just one of purchases from the artist..so I don't think that would be an issue.

 

Also a lot of the artists advertise their work already via their own websites which people can buy but they have to fill in a form to contact them etc They can't simple click add to cart and fill out the details.

Edited January 9, 201412 yr by 1clickweb

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