Becoming An Online Antique Store

If you love antique furniture, you probably also enjoy searching for it. 

The thrill of the hunt, whether by searching antiques craigslist, shopping at small shops near you, going to flea markets or having fun at an old fashioned auction, can make finally finding your treasure all the more fun!

However, the world is rapidly changing! Could the world of antique shopping be changing as well?

For instance, locally here, one of the biggest retailers seems to be trying to shift their model of business. Walmart, a retail store, now offers a service where customers don't even have to leave their cars!

Yes, that's right. They actually allow you to place an order for your groceries online, and then bypass the check out lines. You simply drive to their pick up area. The retail giant will then load your car for you! 

In many ways, this recent change confirms a shift in the way large businesses have to adapt to an online marketplace. 

Nowadays, you can purchase everything from mattresses to modern furniture online. Small town centers continue to die. And people are getting even more comfortable entering in their credit card information to numerous websites online. 

As a small antique shop, we believe the future is here. 

That's right. We took a huge risk, and decided to close our "retail shop." For the last four months, we have been working tirelessly on trying to transform our business to an online antique shop ourselves. Here is our homepage, in case you are curious. www.ebohemians.com 

My husband, fortunately, came from a web background, but took about a seven or eight year hiatus to run the antique shop with me. You would think we would have prioritized our web presence for our small shop from the beginning. And in some ways we did. But, as any bricks and mortar business owner knows, the everyday sourcing of your inventory, running the business, selling, delivering and marketing work makes doing anything else seem somewhat daunting. 

Our site, when we finally got back to it, needed new software, plugins, content, photos and the like. So, taking a gamble, we decided we would commit to it, open by appointment and try to get this new business off the ground. 

We also both had huge learning curves (more like mountains) to climb over. For me, the blogging, which seemed fairly simple (I did ok in college English courses) has been the most challenging. Studying keywords, h2 tags, formatting, and even the Yoast Readability score (!) etc has driven me to tears on more than one occasion. Greg had a harder time understanding the "New World" of search engine traffic. But somehow, we are still moving forward and trying to see this project to its completion.

Here we are four months later. Our site has had some sales through our online shopping cart. (Victory!) Our blog has gone from non-existent to somewhat readable (ha!), our warehouse has become more organized and set up less like a showroom but more like a box store warehouse. 

If you would like to see what our warehouse looks like these days, click to watch the video. 

We figure, learn from the big businesses, move forward and adapt. 

To supplement our cash flow (we are talking about quite a few months, after all), we decided to liquidate some of our "stale" merchandise on about a monthly or bi-monthly basis. Lots went to auction, some went on sale to our local customers. In general, cleaning the house is probably a good thing for antique dealers (aka hoarders). 

Our goals for this new business are the same as Walmart's goals in many ways. We want to make the process of shopping for antique furniture simpler. We want to keep our operating costs down. We want to minimize damage and theft. Finally, we want to potentially reach a bigger market and make more sales. 

The web is an exciting and confusing place! Join us as we make this exciting transition to becoming an online antique store!