New Website!

Hey! Here it is! My new website. It’s about time, right? Seems like everyone else is updating their website all fancy-like every year at least, and for me it’s been more than two? Yeah, I think more than two. My only excuse is that I do it all myself and I have to make time between all the sewing and eating and bike-riding and gardening and all that other life stuff. That, and I have to find the right web platform for my online shop. That is sometimes a waiting game more than anything. You know, when you don’t have a team hired to do it, you just sort of sit there and close your eyes and wiggle your nose and sort of hope it does itself.

It doesn’t.

I had been using the Shopp plugin for WordPress, and initially was quite happy with it. But man, with that last major upgrade to Shopp 1.2, it got really unwieldy. I mean, I had already hacked every corner of it to do what I wanted, but then they went and added “upgrades” like the unsharp mask for my photos. Hate to be nit-picky, but that was a final straw. It wasn’t even properly capturing orders, so when they took my already lovely, crisp photos tried to make them crispier (hey, what the heck?), I jumped ship. I can be petty, huh?

I stumbled into WooCommerce serendipitously and so far I’m happy with it. One thing I’ve been able to do is leave PayPal as a credit card processor (ie merchant service). I am pretty excited to now be running credit cards with Stripe, a little San Fran company with a totally reasonable mission, and reasonable fees. It’s something most people don’t think about, but small businesses like mine (and other ones like new restaurants, even) can be crippled by merchant service fees. We love to be able to offer the convenience of paying with a credit card, but it’s at a cost to us. I have to keep the balance on this end of customer convenience vs. profit. “Whoa!” You might think, “You charge $25 a hat!” But I don’t sell nearly as many hats as someone with a hat factory. I am the hat factory. Little Package is a one-person hat factory sustaining one person sustainably (and a few non-profits, and the tax man). I know a lot of people struggle with that scale because in the last century we’ve become accustomed to everything being mass-produced and available cheap, but I live on that tiny, old-fashioned scale. And I do it with my whiz-bang website. Old, meet new.