I’m Mer, and I’m one of the real people, and real crafters, behind Wicked Plum. Like many of the artists I know, I grew frustrated with the utter lack of easy-to-use, search engine-friendly, affordable e-commerce solutions. If you’re a small business, a crafter, a musician, an artist, or a hobbyist, your e-commerce options are frustrating at best.
Dani and I used to make jewelry, so this is an issue I’m pretty familiar with. So, rather than fight with the least of many evils, I decided to build my own.
I see e-commerce from both a technical and a seller’s perspective. I understand that it’s just as important to have a search engine-friendly website as it is to have a site that’s easy to run. It should work, it should be simple, and there should be friendly, accessible help if it’s not. The result is a site that’s almost as easy to sell from as it is to shop at, and we call that surprisingly sweet e-commerce.
Have a look around, or call me today at 716.241.1676. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.
Mer
Boo
Bob
Wicked Plum is built on WordPress, the most popular website platform on the internet today. I built Wicked Plum on WordPress because it’s a simple, straightforward, user-friendly way for non-tech people to do wonderful things on the internet, like run a store. I took the standard WordPress package, added the ability to set up shop, so to speak, and focused on making it even easier to use.
WordPress isn’t the only star on the team, however. Rounding out the lineup are Mal’s E-Commerce for shopping cart software, a custom inventory management script, and a whole host of other things that I’ll get around to writing about eventually.
Open Source?
WordPress, along with a lot of the technology we use in-house, is an open-source project. There are a lot of really nerdy reasons why open-source technology is vital to the internet, why it’s a critical model for software development, why well-supported open-source projects can be more secure than their closed-source competitors, and why open-source is good for democracy, and we believe every single one of them. The reason you care about open-source technology: it lets you pay for expertise, not software.
Here’s the thing. On the internet, two things are always true. First, everything is free somewhere. Second, nerds always tweak whether they’re paid to or not. Open Source software embraces these truisms. Software that could be stolen is given away. Code that could be licensed as a business property is widely shared. Instead of paying for the privilege of having a program at all, you can put your money into making it awesome.
