OTC Vintage Clothing

14-Mar-2017

A new site for a business selling beautiful and unique vintage clothes.

Originally this shop used the Magento platform; and this over complicated, over bloated system is not easy to work with. A template had been installed and it did look good but it had it's own features and menu on top of what Magento provides and this made it difficult to work out where you had to go to make changes. The logic behind where things are put is very different to Woocommerce and it can take much searching and Googling to work out how to make some changes.

You can set up different "shops" with it and the only use I can think of for this would be to have a shop for each language you want to sell to. As each item would need to be copied to each "shop" it would be a lot of work to add new stock as well.

Shopify

I suggested Shopify and WordPress with Woocommerce. Even with the monthly subscription Shopify was chosen.

As for the Virgo and Her store I set up working with Shopify is relatively easy; it's certainly much easier to work with than Magento. The back end is simpler as there is no provision for selling through multiple shops like what Magento provides for.

Shopify has a monthly fee but this includes hosting and the payment gateway.

The free templates are very basic and I think most shop owners will find it's better to buy one of the more attractive themes available.

District Theme

OTC Vintage Clothing uses the District theme. What I love about setting up Shopify is that it's easy to customise with a view from the front end which is very similar to WordPress. You can see your changes right away. Fonts and colours are easy to change but major customisation, like the panels, needs changes done to the template using Shopify's own language "liquify". Although it's very different to PHP it's easy to learn due to the descriptive words the language uses.

Advertising

Shopify includes some neat features to promote your site, there's a pop up newsletter sign up form, Instagram feed and blog. These help keep the site fresh and interesting to customers and will help with ranking your site high on search engine results.