I am excited and happy to announce:
Finally I managed to build an online shop for selling my small range of photographic nature greeting cards directly to anywhere, instead of just locally here in our own community store. It is part of my photographic gallery site http://naturalscotland.co.uk
For the technical minded:
You need javascript enabled in your browser, but that should be quite normal for most. The shopping basket is javascript based(simplecartjs), which makes it react immediately to changes, which should be much more fun! The site itself is PmWiki based (PHP), the design is my own.
Thank you! I’ve been selling them as folded greeting cards for years here locally, not in big numbers, but a steady stream, even through the “dark times” (off-season), when there are not many visitors passing through. I love nature photography, and these cards are just a nice way to spread that joy.
If this will take off as a web shop will be seen. Unfortunately international postage and banking (PayPal) fees can be quite high, but for UK shoppers it is not so bad. And it gets better if one buys five or more.
I hope to expand it with offering mounted prints. But I don’t want to invest too big in stock, so it would be more a case of making these as ordered.
Nice website, Hans. Somewhere in the group of photos I was expecting to see a 50 pound cabbage from the Findhorn Garden, but maybe that botanical exuberance was only from a previous era when the nature spirits were more active.
Thanks Doug, hmm, I don’t know, there are some lovely and productive gardens here. Nature is certainly very active, and with the help of wind shelter and good composting some amazing plants can be grown. The whole area is blessed by a beneficial local micro-climate with more sun throughout the year than most places in Scotland, combined with the warmth from a branch of the Golf stream swirling along these shores, which provides us with fairly mild winters, hardly days with frost.
Saying that: right now it is absolutely foul, cold, windy, soaking wet! And it goes on and on. And that after Summer arrived in March!
That lichen grows on a wooden post, part of a groyne at the beach (if that is the right word). We are blessed with clean air, and lichen grows in abundance on trees too everywhere.
There were quite a few of your notecards that I found stunning. You had great subjects to choose from. Nature Sanctuary and Kinloss Abbey were two of my favorites. I’ll add this to my wish list of places when I go on the grand tour.
May you have much success. Will you be expanding the line?
Kinloss Abbey is the ruin of an old abbey in the next village. It had been once a powerful place governing much of the area. There is still an active abbey near by: Pluscarden Abbey, in a peaceful valley five miles just over the nearest hills, housing a group of Benedictine monks. I go there sometimes to hear their Gregorian chanting during mass and absorb the powerful stillness of the place. http://www.pluscardenabbey.org/
The Nature Sanctuary is a cute little building in the Park here (as this old caravan park is called mostly), housing a circular meditation room. I go there singing with whoever turns up every morning for 25 minutes, usually between 6 to 20 people, singing in harmony mostly Taize songs. A great start to the day when I am up to it!
I add other cards as I can. The butterfly was the latest, taken during our summer weather in March! I also do some variation according to the seasons. In the local shop here I am limited with space, but with the web shop I am not. Still I would need to keep additional stock. Printing on demand does not quite work for me, I am not printing these myself, they are professionally produced somewhere in England.
Interesting! I hear the jet stream is way South right now, driving one low pressure system after the other through the South of England. Normally it should be North of the British Isles. This had the odd effect of local flooding and flood warnings in some English counties, while at the same time they have an official drought declared, with reservoirs very low, and hose pipe bans in place!
I imagine (have not checked) the jet stream is way South in America as well, as it circles the Northern Hemisphere.
[Now have I got all the Capital letters right in this post I wonder, I am never sure on the rules on this?]
Offering the cards as an assortment of cards rather than individual cards help solve the problem of being able to sell the cards you print, versus being sold out of one image and over-stocked with another.
Thanks Doug. I may do this if I have to. Right now I rather offer more choice, and try to be flexible around this. I cannot see that running out of stock will be a big problem for some time, unless this takes off rather fast. And I can get cards printed in small quantities, which has allowed me to try out new photos with only small risk.
If you ask me, God should get the wind currents a little better organized. Then we could enjoy perfectly predictable weather, none of this hit or miss stuff that we have been experiencing.
