Is My Idea... Too Stupid...?
Hey y'all!
So, earlier this year, I had made a post asking people about how they hosted their own online stores and why they chose what they did. Thank you so much to everyone who posted! Now... I may have an idea that's a little too stupid, even by my standards, but I wanted to hear what y'all had to say.
Amongst all the other things I'm working on at the moment, one of the things I'm working on getting made before my 2024 Festival Run is a catalogue to give out to passing attendees so they can browse my items on the go, and even place an order after the fact. This catalogue is going to be a festival-exclusive item, with there being a mail-in form at the back.
Here's where it gets stupid real fast.
Do I have my "online store" just be a digital equivalent of a catalogue with a form that they would fill out and mail in? Maybe with Venmo/CashApp/PayPal/etc buttons for people to pay ahead of time...? Or maybe they just fill out the order form and payment form?
It would solve the problem of hosting a store and dealing with these store hosting services charging processing fees... but there's that one part of my brain that's just going "this is the stupidest idea you've ever had, Kalli."
If you're wonder why the [REDACTED] I would even think of doing it that way, I just think it'd be neat? A little inconvenience to remind everyone that convenience has maybe begun to rot our minds in one way or another? I dunno... I think it'd be fun?
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Hmm - from a technical standpoint, you can do an online catalog and order request form with Wordpress and a free plugin called Kadence Blocks. The plugin lets you do a bunch of custom stuff on pages, including custom forms that email you when someone fills it out. It's what I used to create this page. But an online store is free too with Wordpress, and there is no transaction fee (just Paypal fees or Stripe fees) if you set it up the right way!
I looked into it and was surprised to discover that things have changed lol. It used to be that Wordpress was software you installed on your website and all Wordpress installations were separate from hosting. Now Wordpress has started offering hosting. And yup, sure enough, they're charging "transaction fees" on all plans that aren't paying a ridiculous amount per month for web hosting.
BUT - Wordpress IS still free open source software. The way to get the free version is to pay separately for web hosting, and install it using Softaculous on either CPanel or DirectAdmin (both of these are website admin panels that web hosts use to let people update their websites). I'm actually going to be walking Chiarra through how to do this pretty soon, and we're going to post it on ISG's Youtube channel as a tutorial for our members!