You are selling the same piece in two places at once
Most craft sellers here work an exhibition circuit. Melas through the winter, an emporium tie-up, a stall during the season when the city fills up. The shop stays open the whole time and the website never closes.
That is three sales channels pointing at one shelf, and the piece on that shelf is unique. When it sells at a stall on Saturday afternoon, the listing has to close before anyone online pays for it.
Stock management handles the mechanism — quantity hits zero, the item comes off sale. What it cannot do is know that a piece left your hands at a mela. That part is a habit: mark it sold in the admin panel from your phone, at the stall, when the money changes hands.
Sellers who build that habit run a clean catalogue for years. Sellers who plan to update it in the evening end up refunding people, and a refund on a one-of-a-kind piece is the one refund a buyer remembers.
The customer who bought from you in person is your best online buyer
Someone walks into Bapu Bazaar, spends forty minutes with you, buys a piece and flies home to Pune. Six months later they want two more as wedding gifts. Right now that sale depends on whether they kept your card.
This is the single most valuable thing a website does for a Jaipur craft shop, and it has nothing to do with search rankings. It gives the person who already trusts you somewhere to come back to.
WhatsApp ordering fits how this actually happens. They send a photo of the piece they bought and ask if you have something similar. You reply with a link. Customer management keeps the order history, so when they say "the one I bought last Diwali" you can look it up instead of guessing.
Put your web address on the bill, on the packing slip and on the card you hand across the counter. That is the whole marketing plan for the first year, and it works better than anything you could buy.
Blue pottery breaks, and that is a packing problem not a courier problem
Anyone selling blue pottery, marble inlay or glass work out of Jaipur has opened a return and found pieces. It is easy to blame the courier. Usually it is the box.
A fragile piece needs to be immobilised, not just padded — no movement inside the inner box, then that box suspended inside a larger one. It costs more in material and takes longer to pack, and it is the difference between a two percent breakage rate and a fifteen percent one.
On the site, say what you do. A short line on the product page about how fragile pieces are packed reassures a buyer about to spend four thousand rupees on something that has to survive a journey.
When something does break, returns management keeps the claim in one queue with the photographs attached, instead of scattered across chat. You need those photographs anyway if you are going to raise it with the courier.
Prices are in rupees, and that decides who can order
Jaipur craft has a foreign audience, so this needs saying plainly rather than being discovered later.
The store shows prices in Indian rupees only. There is no multi-currency display and no currency switcher. A buyer abroad sees a rupee figure and converts it themselves.
There is also no international shipping built into checkout. Cross-border delivery depends on your own courier arrangement, your documentation and what you are willing to handle — so an overseas order is a conversation, not a checkout button.
None of this stops export enquiries arriving. It changes where they land. The site brings the enquiry, you close it on WhatsApp or email with your own rates and terms. Being upfront about it on the page prevents the disappointed message from a buyer in London who filled a cart and found no way to pay for delivery.
Photographing stock where nothing is identical
In most categories you photograph one item and sell four hundred of it. Here you photograph four hundred items and sell each one once. That changes the economics of a shoot completely.
The practical answer is a fixed setup you can use in two minutes — one corner, one light source, one background, one phone position. Not a studio. Consistency matters more than quality, because the shop looks coherent when a hundred pieces are lit the same way.
Three frames per piece is usually enough: the whole object, one close range on the work itself, and one with something for scale. The scale shot prevents the most common complaint in this trade, which is that the piece arrived smaller than the buyer pictured.
Write dimensions and weight as fields, not as a sentence buried in the description. Product management carries them per item, and they are the first thing a serious buyer looks for.
When the pieces are not made by you
A lot of shops here sell work from artisans in Sanganer, Bagru and the villages around them. The stock often lives with the maker until it sells. That is a normal arrangement and the website has to be built knowing it.
Be clear about what the platform is. This is a single-seller store. There is no multivendor mode and no vendor management panel — the makers do not get their own logins, dashboards or automatic payout splits. Every listing is yours, every order comes to you, and settlement with the artisan stays the way you already handle it.
What you can do is give credit properly. Put the maker, the technique and the village into structured fields on the product page. Buyers who care about provenance are the same buyers who pay full price, and a page that names the craftsman does more for that sale than the word handmade repeated three times.
Keep dispatch honest for pieces held with the maker. If collecting takes two days, say two days rather than promising same-day dispatch.
What it costs
Starter — ₹4,990 one-time. Full catalogue with per-piece attributes, stock management, Razorpay and COD, GST invoicing and the admin panel. Live in three to five days.
Pro — ₹9,990. Adds Shiprocket, Partial COD, abandoned cart recovery, Meta Pixel and customer reviews.
Elite — ₹19,990. Adds Meta CAPI, WhatsApp order automation, advanced analytics and multi-store admin.
One-time, no monthly fee, no commission on your sales. Hosting and domain are paid directly to those providers.
Plans & Pricing
Hosting (~₹500–800/month) and a domain (~₹800/year) are paid directly to those providers. No markup, no per-order commission.
Complete store, Razorpay + COD, GST invoicing, admin panel.
Adds Shiprocket, Partial COD, abandoned cart, Meta Pixel, reviews.
Adds Meta CAPI, WhatsApp automation, advanced analytics, multi-store admin.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I stop selling a piece online that I already sold at a mela?
Can overseas buyers order from the website?
Can the artisans I work with manage their own listings?
What happens when a fragile piece arrives broken?
Ready to start selling online in Jaipur?
Tell us what you sell — we'll show you exactly what your store will look like before you pay anything.