Selling One-of-a-Kind Items Online

Items that exist once

An antique dealer has one oak sideboard. A painter has one canvas, a potter one bowl with that glaze, a consignment shop one leather jacket in that size.

Most online shop software is built for selling the same thing many times. It assumes a product photograph that stands for a hundred units, and stock that is replenished.

A unique item breaks those assumptions. It needs its own page and photographs, a stock count of one, and a plan for the moment two people try to buy it.

What changes when there is only one

• Each piece needs its own page, written for that piece alone.
• Every photograph must show that piece, not one like it.
• The stock count is one, and the shop must enforce it.
• Sales elsewhere have to reach the website at once.
• Sold pieces need somewhere to go other than the bin.
• The second buyer needs a plan before it happens.

The third sounds like a setting, and it is, but shop systems differ in when they take an item off sale. That difference decides whether two people can pay for the same piece.

A page for each piece

The page describes this item, not the category: dimensions in centimetres and inches, materials, maker or period, and condition, including every chip, repair and mark.

Add what a buyer needs to decide without touching it: weight for shipping, how it was made or found, and how it should be cared for.

Unique pages also help people searching for a maker's name or a particular style, since each description is written fresh rather than copied from a supplier.

Photographs of the actual item

Buyers cannot pick it up, so the photographs do the handling. Show the front, back, sides and underneath, any maker's mark or signature, and something for scale.

Photograph flaws as carefully as the best side. A buyer who finds an unmentioned crack asks for a refund; one who saw it in the photograph decided it did not matter.

Use the same background and light for every piece, so the shop looks deliberate rather than gathered.

A stock of one, enforced

Switch on stock tracking, set each piece to one, and switch off backorders, so the shop refuses a second sale rather than accepting one.

Then find out when your system takes the piece off sale. Some reserve it when checkout starts. Others wait until payment is confirmed, and with an outside payment page, two people can both be paying at once.

Test it: open the same piece in two browsers, start checkout in both, and see what the second buyer is told.

Sales that happen off the website

Many sellers of unique pieces also sell at a counter, a market table or a show. Each of those sales has to reach the website straight away.

The simplest rule is that whoever takes the money marks the piece sold, from a phone, before wrapping it. Many shop systems can be managed from a phone, and a minute's delay is how pieces get sold twice.

Where that is impractical, switch the buy button off for anything taken to an event, and say on the page where the piece is this weekend.

Holds work the same way. If you agree to keep a piece for someone until Friday, switch its buy button off and mark it on hold, so nobody else pays for it in the meantime.

A worked example

A craft fair organiser runs three fairs a year in a community hall and, between fairs, sells pieces by about thirty of its regular makers through an online shop, on consignment.

At the December fair, a stoneware teapot sold at its potter's table on Saturday morning. Online it was still for sale, and that evening someone bought it there.

In January the newsletter featured a quilt, and two people paid for it within minutes. The shop only removed an item once the outside payment page confirmed payment, so both payments went through.

The shop now reserves a piece when checkout begins. Pieces going to a fair are marked as at the fair this weekend, with the buy button off until Monday.

Sold pieces stay on each maker's page as a gallery, with a link to ask about a commission. And a short apology email for a second buyer, with a full refund, is written and ready.

Sold pieces as a portfolio

Deleting a sold piece throws away a good page. People still find it through search and shared links, and an error page tells them nothing.

Keep the page, mark it sold clearly, and take it out of the shop's main listings. Link from it to similar pieces available now, the maker's other work, or a way to ask about something made to order.

A gallery of sold work also shows new visitors the range of what passes through the shop.

The second buyer

However careful the system, it will happen eventually. What matters is the next hour.

Refund in full straight away, without waiting to be asked. Then write personally: say plainly what happened, apologise, and do not blame the software.

Offer something real: first look at the maker's next pieces, a similar item, or a commission. Never substitute a different piece without asking.

The counter-case

Not every unique item suits a cart. Expensive antiques and large artworks often sell better through an enquiry button, with a conversation, a viewing and an invoice.

And a seller with only a handful of pieces online at a time may do well with a simple gallery and a phone number.

Once there is a cart, though, the rules hold: one page, honest photographs, a stock of one the shop enforces, and every sale recorded the minute it happens.

Before the next listing

1. Set every piece's stock to one.
2. Switch off backorders for unique items.
3. Test two checkouts at once in two browsers.
4. Mark counter sales sold from a phone immediately.
5. Keep sold pages as a gallery.
6. Write the apology email before you need it.
7. Photograph every flaw as carefully as the best side.

Step three is the one that reveals how your shop really behaves. Ten minutes with two browsers answers a question that otherwise gets answered by two customers.

Keeping a page full of product photographs quick on a phone is covered in images hidden on phones but still downloaded.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.