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Cutoff Crafts Has an Online Store!

We have an online store! Check it out

That one sentence is causing a lot of excitement here at Cutoff Crafts. Now shoppers can find our wonderful products anytime they desire and not just at craft fairs and other events.  Don't worry, we will still be attending as many craft fairs as we can that meet our unique tastes and needs. This store simply adds another avenue to connect and provide our loyal customers with ways to buy items we have lovingly handcrafted in Northern Idaho. 

Believe it or not, it took us a while to figure out where we wanted to host our store and how we were going to do it.  Our main concerns were making a store that is safe and secure for our shoppers, pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate, and provide additional details to our customers. These concerns and requirements lead to weeks of debates, discussions, and sorting through so many choices. I had no idea there were so many ecommerce options for budding our store.

Honestly, we tried a few options to see how they would play out. We tried PayPal first. PayPal, while they provided useful checkout and "buy it now" buttons, required a bit of coding, constant care and tracking, and unfortunately, it lacked the ability to organize the hundreds of buttons needed to create a usable store. This was not the ease we were looking for.. We tried a few sites on a trial bases to see if the shopping experience would be better than our handmade PayPal store. While these sites integrated into our blog and provided a lovely dashboard to create listings, after the initial trial period, their monthly fee was a little expensive. It was starting to look like we would never enter the online store world. Thankfully, Cutoff Crafts was about to discover something amazing!

Cutoff Crafts, like many vendors that attend amazing events, uses Square in order to take credit cards, google pay, and other forms of payments. But what we didn't know was that with this amazing device we also received something that we had no idea existed until recently. Did you know Square provides a free ecommerce website to sell our items online? That it's free and fully customizable? Wait...what?!?!?!

Yup! By clicking the beautifully small button that reads, "online", anyone with a Square account can begin the process of creating an online store. We went through each step by building our website to match our theme and brand, listing items, setting up shipping requirements, and setting up taxes.  Once each step was done, Cutoff Crafts entered the online world.  

So did Square hit all the concerns and requirements needed to be a viable platform for our most awesome online store? 



The process to discover the truth was simple. All we had to do was ask and answer 3 important questions:

1. Was it safe and secure for our customers? Since this is Square, which is a trusted and secure place to take payments that many of our customers use, the ecommerce website checked the safety and secure box. 

2 Was it easy for our customers to navigate? Because I could customize the store, I was able to make navigation as simple as possible and make the store pleasing to the eye all while matching the Cutoff Crafts brand and color theme. This checked off the navigation box and the pleasing to the eye box. 

3. Could I provide additional details about each item sold with extra images for the customers to read and look through? Each item is added individually providing a space for details, a space for several images, and even a place to track inventory so that our customers know how many we have for sale. This, checked off the details box.

Best of all, Square is easy on the checkbook. I encourage others to use the Square site and try it out  for themselves. Click the image below to start your own online ecommerce!

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