This morning we announced the opening of www.clothpadshop.com – a store where individual cloth pad (and other related items) sellers can get together to create a “one stop shop” type of store.

I’ve been so busy trying to get everything done for it… last night I went to bed at 4am (literally it turned 4am as I slid into bed)…. and I asked hubby to wake me up at 8am to give me an hour to finish everything before I “officially” opened the store, but we slept in and I didn’t get up until 8:30 gah! So I just had time. And then I went in to delete the “opening soon” from the front page, and stuffed something up, so I restored the backed up file, which I’d obviously not backed up other than the once, when there was nothing but the “coming soon” text! So I had a mild panic, and had to quickly try and remember what I’d said before….

So its now up and running…. I hope it goes well. We have a few more people who are planning to join but our timing wasn’t quite right for them.

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. Hubby thinks its monotone with all the purple, but I wanted to make something a little neutral so that the actual products stand out more. It doesn’t look like it, but there is about 70 hours work gone into there! It comes as a template (which is good, I don’t know much html), but I’ve actually done a fair amount of tweeking to get things as I want. If you take other Congos as an example (eg www.wahmnaps.com) you can get a picture of the things I changed. I have to give credit to Nathan though (he owns the congo system)… for all the help he has given me, and with things like the extra bar at the bottom of the listings (giving the # in stock, price and the store name), I just sent him a pic and description of what I wanted, and he did it for me I really wanted to give each store a mini-webpage type feel, so that they had something that was theirs, and a bit more useful than the normal “about us” page that is provided. So I directed the stores to their about us page, rather than their product page as it is normally set up to do… and I added some links to there, so that visitors can find the blogs and things more easily.

I’ve also included a store that is set up for selling off used pads. A gross concept to some, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while, given the popularity of swapping/selling used pads in the Cloth Pad Live Journals.. and lots of women (myself included) have pads in their stash that aren’t right for them for some reason, most women would love to make room for other pads in their stash. So we’ll see how that goes.

My ultimate goal will be to have a US part of the store too, so that we can become a megastore I keep seeing posts asking where to buy pads, and where to find instock pads, so I thought it would be easier for customers if there could be one main place to go and find lots of sellers there. I also figured that smaller/newer pad business could benefit from the extra exposure such a store would get, and that all stores would benefit by the fact the store might attract more customers than they themselves would ordinarily get.

I actually hadn’t tested the store in Opera (the browser I normally use, when not using Mozilla, which I’d been using for this store)… and its not showing quite right… like with IE, its showing a black border around the heading image… but opera isn’t showing the borders around the side or top menus and around the page content… so it looks a bit crap. Not sure how to fix that either

So I’ve done all my restocking there, except for 3 of the dyed contoured pads, which are in my www.obsidianstar.wahmweb.com store (under “AIO” pads, even though they don’t have waterproofing). You may notice I tweeked that store a little…. I have ben busy

Pic of them…