Red Letter Clay is a handmade ceramic line. After a 5 year studio practice and selling at various markets around Chicago, I designed & developed an online store to allow for national shipping and in-person pick ups as an option for sales.
With the ever increasing prices of CMS platforms requiring annual commitments for the best prices, I opted to stay contract free by going with an offsite shopping cart system called Snipcart. What is my monthly hosting fee? $0!
Snipcart is a developer-first HTML/JavaScript shopping cart platform. It has a few advantages:
A Kubernetes script hosted for free on Digital Ocean checks Snipcart's API and places a sold overlay on items that have been purchased before the website is updated. While Snipcart provides this information in the shopping cart modal when items are added, this solution provided a superior user experience for shoppers by quickly showing them what was no longer available. The script also adds a CSS class to the Add to Cart button, to hide it on the page when the item is sold.
I found Snipcart great for shops that don't manage huge inventories - the perfect fit for a handmade ceramic line that's typically updated in small batches.
Clean straightforward navigation and layouts for mobile devices make for pleasant shopping experiences on social media and via email. These can be easily incorporated into Instagram stories & various marketing campaigns.
Using Jekyll's native blog post features, galleries and videos can be featured to understand the maker's interests and inspiration for his ceramic practice. Tagging the posts aids visitors seeking particular types of content.
