How To Open An Online Vintage Store

thevintagebungalow

thevintagebungalow

VFG Member
Hi Everyone,
I have been selling vintage on Ebay for about 5 years now. I have seriously contemplating an online store. I have noticed that many of you have both. How do I get started on such a thing? Did you have a webmaster design your site? How do you go about registering a name & site? Do you take credit card payment as a merchant or do you use Paypal? Is it expensive to upkeep or are there charges at all? Any of your advice and expertise would be much appreciated. If I do it, I want to do it right. I just have so much stock, it would be nice to be selling it in two places. Plus, I am going to go in with some other vintage sellers in the area for a booth space at a Women's Fair. If I do that, I would like to have a "store" for those potential customers to hopefully shop (besides ebay, of course).
Thanks in advance!
Carrie
 
I think you can do it relatively simply - it just depends how fancy you want it to be, and how 'designed' a look you want.

If you have a name in mind it may be worth registering the domain name as you can do that yourself if it's free, and it shouldn't be at all expensive. probably worth doing that anyway if it is something you're thinking about as names do tend to get bought up!

I use Zen Cart which is a free shopping cart thing that you can alter although to be honest I think it's a bit complicated, and I used it as my web designer arranged it, and I take credit card payments through Payapl. Paypal has it's own checkout now, as does Google, so you could probably design a simple site around them. If I were starting again I might do something with Google checkout.

I don't pay anything other than webhost fees, and paypal fees.

The of course there are the vintage online malls like babylon mall, and main street vintage , probably others I haven't heard of. Others will be able to tell you about the pros and cons of them I'm sure.

Hope that helps!

Harriet :)
 
I'm lucky as my lovely Gary created both my sites (C&C and the Antique Corset Gallery) so I didn't need the help of a web site designer. If you have a friend or family member that knows how to create websites (you don't need anything fancy, just something simple that will showcase your wares), that will save you money.
If you can learn a bit of html, it will also help you when updating your site so you know what you are looking at.

If not, maybe ask a computer teacher at a local school, college or uni whether any of their students maybe interested in creating a website for you for some extra cash?

Definitely register your domain name as soon as you can as all the good ones get snapped up. Make sure you do it through a reputable registrar like Go Daddy or 123-reg (http://www.123-reg.co.uk NOT the dotcom one).

For webhosting, make sure you research who you go with and make sure they don't have a lot of people complaining about them or that they don't go down too often. Google is an excellent place to research a webhost.

Gary wrote me a simple shopping cart program but it does not have any integrated payment systems. The program emails the order and then I write back to the customer with the total and the payment details and so far, no probs. If someone says that the want to pay by Paypal, then I send them a Paypal invoice along with my email.

Lei
 
The best thing about "mals" is that you can make it look very similar to your own site so it's hard to see you have left your site which I think is good. It can be set up to use your own postage calculations also .
instead of the normal system found on some carts. The people who write shopping carts are great at programming , but have little practical experience of packing up and posting stock and sorting out the costs.

I have also found this one for a store front http://www.shop-script.com/

I had it working on my space to test it out and it works fine for a simple shop it is also FREE.
 
I use Mal's on my site. I think it works pretty well, and the price ($0) is great!

Unfortunately, I have consistently had problems with order notifications not being delivered to my email inbox. I'm not sure if the problem is with my email service or with Mal's. I get around the problem by checking my order list at least once a day.

Laura
 
Originally posted by vintagefashionlibrary

Unfortunately, I have consistently had problems with order notifications not being delivered to my email inbox. I'm not sure if the problem is with my email service or with Mal's. I get around the problem by checking my order list at least once a day.

Laura
Click to expand...
Strange you should say that as it just happened to me last week , I thought it was just a glitch but reading you post it may not be.
 
I'd give Babylon a try if you're not too sure of your committment level yet. You do have to do a bit of "self pimping" so to say, but if you get yourself a site and link to Babylon through it, you can be working on pushing the site name and have plans for improvement later. Then when you're ready, you can up to selling at your site, too.

Oh, wait, that's what I'm doing.
I'm planning on doing some site direct next year, after the wee one goes to full time school (my baby! sniffle sniff). Until then, I use my site as a hub.
 
Jenn, I felt all sniffly about the thought of full time school but mine loves it so much that it's really a brilliant thing all round. Plus you get to try to keep work to school times so at weekends you can do family stuff. Like going buying, lol :D
 
Babylon sounds like it might be the way to go. I will check in on it. I think I'll be sending my daughter to full time school next year. However, my 2 1/2 year will only go to preschool 2 days a week. I am looking forward to hitting thrift stores and estate sales while they are both in school. Even an 1 1/2 hours of shopping alone sounds like a dream, you know??

Thanks everyone for your great input and advice. It really gives me a lot to think on.
Carrie
 
You can also take a look at http://specialistauctions.com I have my own website set up but don't sell from it at this time. My vintage and contemporary stores are at Specialist and the start up cost is very appealing (no store fees, no listing fees and just 3% of your final valuation fee regardless of what the item sells for). :)
 
I use Babylon mall with <a href=http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/?p=MONGO&AID=10432491&PID=1985866>YAHOO</a> webhosting. It works out fantastic!

I don't have to worry about shopping carts, and Yahoo provides you with domain registration and a sitebuilder which is brainless to use!

I pay $8.95/mo for my site and domain and $15/mo for Babylon and that is it!

Feel free to email me with any questions!

-Amanda
 
Hi!
Thanks so much for the additional information. I wish I'd known about what Yahoo had to offer. I went ahead and registered my domain name with another webhosting site. I was afraid it would get taken if I didn't. Babylon mall is sounding better and better. I need to find a class to take on building a website. I have the design skill but not the skill to actually put in on the web. Very frustrating. I actually opened up an ebay store finally. It's called The Vintage Bungalow. Unfortunately, I've been sick for 2 weeks and haven't felt up to listing anything. I'm going to try to get with the program this week.
Thanks again everyone!
Carrie
 
The yahoo site builder makes it real easy to build a site with no required knowledge of HTML. Just simple cut and paste. My site is built with it and it was super easy!

You can transfer use of the domain to Yahoo, and use Yahoo as the webhost...that is what I had to do!

-Amanda
 
After trying an eBay store and a Babylon store, I opened a Bravenet account and built my site myself from there - and I am html illiterate, really.

Hollis
 
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