About the Sales Gallery
The Mission
The mission of the sales gallery is to provide a
shin hanga marketplace by making prints
from my collection available for sale, along with consigned prints from other collectors.
Business will be conducted in a transparent, forthright, and honest manner.
Legalese
"Shotei Gallery" is a trade name, registered in the State of Washington, USA, under my overall business entity,
"Marc Kahn Software LLC".
If you buy or sell through this marketplace, you are doing business with "Marc Kahn Software LLC dba Shotei Gallery".
"dba" is an abbreviation for "doing business as".
Condition Rating System
In the absence of a uniform, standardized methodology for summarizing the condition of prints, I have created
my own. It is fully explained
on this page.
Timeline
The Past
In 2001, when I started the Shotei.com website, I wrote, "
The mission of Shotei.com
is to become both an educational site and an on-line gallery, with a focus on the shin
hanga genre of Japanese woodblock prints."
Over the years, I've used the website to publish a lot of my independent research as well as the
research of other
shin hanga enthusiasts.
From the beginning, the number of people visiting Shotei.com on a daily basis has been a source
of wonder, far exceeding my expectations.
I feel that the mission to be an educational site has been well served.
In 2006, other aspects of my life became more pressing than my passion for Japanese prints.
Since then, I have been on hiatus from actively updating Shotei.com.
Emails from correspondents all over the world continued to come in with new information.
This has led to a very large to-do list which should keep me busy for quite a while, once I get back to it.
It has always been my intention to ultimately use my presence on the web as a venue to create a print marketplace.
Since "day one" the main menu for the Shotei.com home page has had the inactive menu item "Sales Gallery".
Activating that menu item has been part of my planned retirement strategy.
I wasn't in a rush, because I figured that the longer I wait, the more the prints will appreciate in value.
Well... the wait is over. In January, 2014, I had my 65th birthday and stopped working as an
independent computer programming contractor/consultant for hire.
I moved right into studying the latest versions of the software technologies necessary for building
my sales gallery (HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript).
It's been interesting to catch up on web programming and I've enjoyed both the technological transition
and the new experience of working only for myself as an end user.
Now, after 2 months of study and software development, it is March, 2014, and I'm ready to launch the
Shotei.com Sales Gallery pages.
The Present
Shotei Gallery's Sales Gallery is open for business.
There are some prints for sale, and as time goes on more prints will be added.
This is a new venture, and I'm surrounded by unknowns.
Whether or not the sales gallery will meet my expectations and prove to be a worthwhile venture is a big question.
Time will tell...
The Future
If the sales gallery meets with some success, I've got lots of extensions to the user functionality in mind.
Shopping Cart
For user-friendly order entry.
Credit Card Processing
Accepting credit cards will expedite the acceptance of a payment and allow me to ship items to the customer in a timely manner.
Since setting this up will require some expense with my bank and some development effort on my part to assure
the security of credit card account numbers entered, it will have to wait until the sales gallery concept proves to be viable.
Customer Registration and Services
I intend to provide each customer with a user interface and with their own database area to perform the following functions:
- Store email address.
- Securely store login password.
- Look at order history and the status of current orders.
- Store shipping address so it need not be entered with each order.
- Note collecting interests and any specific requests.
- Store and use named searches for the "Items for Sale" page, avoiding the need to re-enter filter data.
Consignor Services
Each consigner will be able to access their data, in order to:
- View each of their consigned prints' statuses.
- View a history of sales and payments, including money due for sold prints.