I've spent the past couple of months down in the code mines building some new features for Handcrafted, and I'm happy to come up for air to share with you all that they are now live! The quick overview is:

Wholesale: We have added wholesale functionality to help facilitate special pricing and sales to dealers and retailers.
Legal policies: We have added a new legal section to the site that outlines all of our various policies.
Chat: Instead of needing to email sellers, there is now a chat inbox right on Handcrafted! This will help to facilitate communication between buyers and sellers for general questions and for wholesale purchase requests (more on that below).
Dashboard improvements: We have cleaned up the layout of the account area of the dashboard, specifically with regard to the tabs that you use to navigate between different account pages.
Loading speed improvements: Not as shiny as the rest, but we've made some optimizations to help the site load up more quickly when first landing on Handcrafted.market and when navigating between pages.

Please note: I recommend clearing your browser cache in order to ensure that you are able to see and use all of these new features as expected.

Wholesale

The major update is the addition of wholesale functionality that aims to streamline the movement of products between sellers and dealers/retailers. You can think of this as filling a similar role to that of applying for a dealer/retailer account with Howard Core, Gewa, Metropolitan, etc.

This wholesale update enables sellers to add wholesale-specific pricing to their instruments and bows, as well as to make instruments and bows available only through wholesale. With this functionality, we're aiming to address situations like these:

You're a maker who wants to offer your instruments at a discount to shops.
You're a shop that wants to offload some inventory, but don't want that inventory available to the average buyer.
You've had some instruments sitting in the back of the shop awaiting repair for god-knows how long, and you want to sell them to somebody who has the time to fix em up.

How does it all work? You can check out our wholesale information page or keep on reading! Please contact us if you're having trouble getting anything set up for wholesale.

Accessing Wholesale

Wholesale pricing and listings are only available to authorized resellers. To have your account marked as tax exempt, simply apply from the "tax exemption" tab of your dashboard after logging into your account or registering a wholesale account. Once your application is approved, applicable orders will be tax exempt and you’ll be able to access wholesale listings and pricing.

Listing for wholesale

As a seller, all you need to do to list an item for wholesale is input the wholesale price and mark whether you want the item to show only to tax exempt customers. Initially, only instruments and bows can be given wholesale pricing, but we hope to extend this to accessories and supplies in the future.

Shopping wholesale

Items that are available at a wholesale rate will be marked as such, with the wholesale price visible to customers logged in with a tax-exempt account. If the item is available only to wholesalers, then it will not show up at all for non-tax-exempt users.

Buying wholesale

Wholesale purchases are unique in that they must be approved by the seller. Instead of an Add to Cart button, wholesale items have a Request Purchase button. This will send a purchase request to the seller and open up a chat with them where the purchase can be discussed. Once approved, you will receive a purchase link where you can check out with any payment method (including bank transfer and financing).

Legal Policies

We have added a fairly thorough section of legal and other policies to the site, which all users agree to abide by when using Handcrafted. These can all be found from our legal page and include:

Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Community Policy
Anti-Discrimination and Hate Speech Policy
Seller Fees
Handmade Policy

The last two relate specifically to seller accounts, but the rest apply to all users. Pay special attention to the Community Policy and Anti-Discrimination and Hate Speech Policy, which we felt were important to implement along with the new chat functionality. Basically just "be cool to each other" and we will all be good to go. If you break these rules, you may lose chat access temporarily or permanently, or your account may be closed for good.

Chat

We've wanted to add chat functionality to the site for a long time, and it turns out that the wholesale functionality was the perfect time to do so!

If you visit a seller's store page, you'll now see a "message" button that, when clicked, will allow you to send an on-site message to the seller. This should help streamline the process of asking questions about products or anything else. When you're logged into the site, you'll now see a "messages" link in the account menu at the top right that will take you to your chat inbox, which will display all of your chat history.

If you are an approved tax-exempt user, you will see a "purchase requests" inbox in addition to the standard chat inbox. This area will contain chat conversations associated with all of your wholesale purchase requests, which we hope will be a nice way to keep everything organized.

Moderation

In our testing, it was communicated to us that there needed to be a way to report users who are abusing the chat -- and we agreed! You will notice a flag icon next to every message in the chat, which you can use to report the message and the user who sent it.

All users are expected to abide by our Community Policy and Anti-Discrimination and Hate Speech Policy, especially as it relates to chat. We encourage you to report any messages that violate these policies or otherwise make you feel uncomfortable for any reason. The Handcrafted team is serious about making this place a non-toxic place for everybody involved.

Dashboard updates

Note much to report here, but we have improved the layout of the account area of the dashboard to make it easier to navigate. This will be helpful to everybody, but especially so for non-sellers since the account section is all that they have access to. This update also makes it easier to apply for wholesale tax-exemption and to manage your email notification settings.

Loading speed improvements

Also not a ton to report here, but we have made a handful of updates that should help to make the site run more smoothly. When you first load up handcrafted.market, the site should appear twice as fast as it did before. Additionally, when navigating to back to pages that you've already visited -- like if you go to Instruments, then click on an instrument, and then click the back button in your brower to go back to Instruments -- the page should appear instantly the second time.

That's it!

We've been working hard these past couple of months to get this all up and running, and we are so excited that it's all finally available to you! We hope that you're stoked to get some wholesale products listed on the site. As always, we couldn't do this without y'all. If you have any questions or concerns, please drop us a line!