Folio: How Bazaar Antiques
How Bazaar Antiques is a large warehouse full of wonderful and truly bizarre antiques and collectables. Packed to the rafters with all manner of furniture, garagenalia and valuable antiques, How Bazaar is literally overflowing with many tens of thousands of precious items.
The challenge was posed: how best to get everything from *inside* How Bazaar *out* to the world?
One solution could easily have been to put up an open-source ecommerce shopping cart – but the result would have been many weeks of hard work cataloguing the thousands of items, only to have the items them walk out the front door by walk-in customers.
The better solution was to drop the requirement of the web site to be *primarily* ecommerce, and instead, change focus to be a business blog, showcasing a small portion of the depth and breadth of How Bazaar’s amazing collection.
By using an open-source blogging engine, and optimising the pages for users coming in via search engines, How Bazaar is truly catering for the long tail of antiques and collectables hunters. Over time, How Bazaar is slowly ‘blogging’ about some of the ephemera that comes into their shopfront, and in doing so, is building up ‘proof’ that they do indeed stock some of the most eclectic range of stock in the southern hemisphere.
Launched in March 2008, the site has been slowly added to each lunchtime, usually by the staff simply going out for a wander, grabbing two of three items of interest, and taking photos and posting them to the site. In this way, rather than trying to compete with more famous auction houses with larger marketing budgets, How Bazaar is slowly but surely promoting their claim to having some ‘truly bizarre’ products in their shop at any time.
Even without a direct ecommerce focus, How Bazaar has had many sales directly from their web site, from customers who have subscribed to their Email Alerts, essentially letting customers with a particular focus be alerted the minute a new product comes online that they are interested in.
With over 500 posts and counting, How Bazaar Antiques is slowly stamping it’s authority on the antiques and collectibles market worldwide.