An online store for artists and makers

A shop built for retail assumes a product is a line with a quantity behind it. Work made by hand is the opposite: each piece is itself, photographed on its own, and when it sells it is gone. Forcing that into a stock system means either one listing per piece with the inventory permanently set to one, or a catalogue that lies about what is available.

Here a product can be exactly that — a single piece with its own images and its own description — and the shop reads as a body of work rather than a warehouse. Where you do make a run, variants and per-SKU inventory handle the sizes properly, so a small edition behaves like an edition instead of a guess.

Nobody buys a ceramic vessel from a spec. They buy it from a photograph that shows the glaze breaking over an edge, and a shop that crops it into a uniform grid tile has thrown away the reason someone would want it.

The page builder is there for this. Sections, image sizes, the order things run in and the amount of air around them are all yours, on any theme, without code. A piece that deserves a full-width plate can have one.

Most people making physical work end up with a digital version of it, and most platforms make that a second shop. A print run, a high-resolution file, a pattern to go with the fabric — they can sit in the same catalogue here, and a physical item can carry a digital file that is delivered automatically when it sells.

That matters more than it sounds, because it is the difference between one shop and two, one checkout and two, and one list of customers instead of two half-lists.

A maker's most valuable asset is the short list of people who already own something. 2,500 contacts are on the plan, so a new firing or a new run is an email you send rather than an ad you buy.

Buyers become contacts automatically at checkout, which means the list builds itself while you are working.

• Kiln — Fired, grained and torn at the edges. For work with a hand in it.

Every theme is a live shop you can scroll before choosing it, and none of them is fixed once applied — the rest of the shelf is worth a look if none of these is right for your work.

On what any of this costs, there is what an online shop actually costs, which breaks the bill into the seven places money goes. Or build one and look at it — building and publishing cost nothing.