Site News & Announcements

[NOTICE] Introducing the Shop Item [beta]

Greetings!

Imagine that you could use the power of Writing.Com's own online shop to easily create your own shop to sell your own services, images, writing and more... I'm pleased to introduce a brand new item type that we're opening to the community for beta testing:

Introducing Writing.Com Shop Items!

Writing.Com Shops are virtual storefronts that may be created in your own portfolio (Premium+ members only) or under your own domain name (Professional/Enterprise members only). Create a shop just like creating any other item on Writing.Com and the rest of the community can enter your shop and purchase your goods!

Writing.Com shops are very easy to setup and can be fully managed from within your portfolio. For each product you wish to sell in your shop, you may give it a title, description, price and even an image, if you choose. The choices for each product are many, including tiered pricing for automatic quantity discounts, pulldown menus for specific choices, text areas for specific wording, and much more. Be as detailed as you wish!

At this time, only a very basic document has been created about shops: "Shop Item Documentation" 


Shop Features (Some of them, at least):
The features list has been moved to: "Shop Item Documentation" 


Important notes about this beta testing release:
We are opening the shops to public beta testing because we believe that the shop system is very close to being fully complete. We do not feel any product or order data within the shop system would be lost due to an upgrade to the system, or its failure. However, we do expect there to be a variety of bugs as members take advantage of this new item type.

1) Physical, shipped products are not yet supported. While we fully intend support the ability for members to sell physical products that require a shipping address and shipping fees, just as the Writing.Com shop does, we're not yet ready to include those features in this current beta. *note*

You can still theoretically sell physical products in the shop
without support for it, but you probably need build flat rate shipping
into the price of the product and then deal with getting the ship-to
info after the sale is completed.

2) Shop Item limitations are as follows:
          Premium Members: 2 Shop Items
          Professional Members: 10 Shop Items
          Enterprise Members: 25 Shop Items

3) We have not yet established a hard limit on the number of products or product images allowed in each shop. We're placing a "soft limit" of 500 products and 2,500 product images per shop. That means that at this time, it would be a good idea not to create a shop with more than that in it, as you might end up having to decrease the products later when we pick a hard limit.

4) If you decide to give this new item type a try, again, please be prepared for bugs! The beta process is the time for the community to help us find what's wrong with the system before we call it "good to go" and bug free!

To that end, we've created "Let's Talk 'Shop'"  for discussion of the new shop item and it's beta testing phase. Please post questions about using the new shop item or creating a shop in this forum, too.


Working Shop Examples:
Of course, you know about "The Writing.Com Shop"  already. Writing.Com's main shop is just an item in The Writing.Com Shop 's portfolio. But we also have two shops already setup by Sr. Mods. They've been helping to work out some of the bugs in our earlier testing. I encourage you to take a look at them!

Kiya's Sig & Banner Shop  [18+] #1540688 *CLOSED* Shop for images - animated/non-animated for site/off-site use. by iKïyå§ama-House Targaryen

Leger's Shop  [18+] #1495077 Gift certificates are available! Signature images and cNotes! Dress up your forums! by Legerdemain

For those members with a Premium+ paid membership that are interested in creating a shop during the beta test release, new shop items can be created using the following URL:
          http://www.writing.com/main/my_portfolio.php?action=add&status=new&num_type=1450...

If you're looking to shop at some of the beta shops, those that you have access to will all be listed here:
          http://www.writing.com/main/list_items/item_type/shops

(These links will be made permanent once we're further along with the beta testing of the shop system.)

We're excited about this new addition and the possibilities it brings to members. We hope you are too!

Thanks for your time and we look forward to your feedback!
~~SM