Welcome to my Shopify store at ScoutPatchHQ.com.  For almost twenty years I've been online in the Boy Scout collecting community with the launch of my first website in 1999.  For most of those years I've tried to have a platform to sell Scouting memorabilia that cut out the 400 lb gorilla in my niche that is eBay.  Although I've been on eBay since 1998 as a seller I've always tried to work around paying them as the middle man.

In the very early days my Santeeswapper.com website was built using MS Frontpage and there was a store baked into it.  The next step was to launch a ProStore in 2007 that was my first step into paying a monthly subscription fee.  I eventually rebranded the ProStore as SanteeswapperStore.com and kept it going even after eBay purchased ProStores.  But eventually I slowed down putting new inventory on the website and my sales faded.  So I pulled the plug not too long before eBay decided to do the same for the entire platform.

My next go of reworking SanteeswapperStore was using a website that a buddy had built called ListItYourselfAuctions.com.  This was a pretty short lived (less than 1 year) experiment.  So after suffering frustrations I decided to task my web girl with finding me a software package that did not have a monthly subscription plan but could handle the task. 

She choose CubeCart as the back end and built me a beautiful site that we branded as ScoutPatchHQ.com.  I spent many months building up the inventory and trying to make the site successful.  However, the Achilles Heel of this web store was the images.  It got to the point where I couldn't even see images in the directory to link them to the listings.  I don't think CubeCart was meant to have a store with thousands of SKUs.  So the first iteration of ScoutPatchHQ.com also went down in flames. 

In 2012 I helped to create a Facebook Group just for Boy Scout patch collectors.  Eventually I developed my own strategy of using photo albums located on my FB business page to offer up patches for sale.  To make it easy to point people there I redirected the url ScoutPatchHQ.com to those albums.  To this day I still use that strategy as Facebook has been a great alternative for me.

The 3rd chance for the domain ScoutPatchHQ.com came in early 2017 when I attended a meet up session on Shopify.  When the presentation showed me how I could link it to my Facebook Page and even do point of sale I was sold.  So I got to work trying to figure out the Shopify world and rebuild from the ashes of those failed efforts.  As my new store launches I'm going to continue to leverage all my social media efforts and my eBay sales to send traffic to this store.  Wish me luck!