BurchCraft: A website and a point of sale for a maker who sells from a tent
Hand-forged axes, hatchets, carved spoons and turned bowls from the Adirondacks, sold at craft fairs, festivals and online. Ryan needed a website that looked like his work, and a way to stop tallying sales in a notebook.
Where he started
BurchCraft's sales happen under a tent. A weekend fair means a Square reader on a phone for cards, a cash box, and a notebook page per event: how many cooking spoons, how many spatulas, who paid cash and who paid card, then the sales tax worked out by hand at the end of the day. It worked, but the tax math was easy to get wrong, one-off pieces like a hatchet never had a line to go on, and there was no way to look back and ask which fairs were actually worth the booth fee.
The website was a Squarespace shop that didn't reflect the craft, and adding a product meant editing it in two places.
What we built
A website with a proper shop, big photos, a page for the craft itself, and the latest YouTube videos and Instagram posts pulled in automatically. The shop reads from the same product list the register uses, so a price changed once is changed everywhere.
The Tent Register is a phone app that lives on the home screen. Tap the items, take cash or card (card hands off to Square and comes back with the sale logged), and the day's total, the tax owed, and what's left after the booth fee are always on screen. It works with no signal at a mountain-top fair and syncs when the phone is back in range. Multi-day events get a table per day. Hatchets, axes and turned bowls are logged as one-of-a-kind pieces with their own price. Sales tax is figured automatically from the fair's county and date, and it knows the difference between a cash price that includes tax and a Square charge that adds it on top.
On a laptop the same app turns into a Workbench: a product editor with photo galleries, stock counts, every event and every sale, and reports that show what earns the most, what moves, how customers pay, and how each fair compared.
What it changes day to day
The notebook is retired. Tax for each quarter is a filter and an export instead of an evening with a calculator. Ryan can see that cooking spoons are about 40% of his sales dollars while a single hatchet is worth a full day of spoons, and that card runs about two-thirds of every fair, which changes what he brings and how he prices. New photos go on the website from the same screen he uses to count stock.
Sell at markets, fairs, or from a tent?
If you're tallying sales on paper, or your website and your inventory don't talk to each other, this is the kind of thing Murray & Co. builds. I'd be happy to put together a free mockup for your business.