ShopLocket

» see shoplocket.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ShopLocket solved a small problem well. If you had made one thing and wanted to sell it, the entire ecommerce industry in 2012 wanted you to open a store and start managing a catalog, when what you actually needed was a buy button you could paste into a page you already had. Katherine Hague and Andrew Louis started it in Toronto in 2011 and the site was answering by January 2012.

Then the market shifted under it. Hardware people kept turning up, specifically people who had just finished a successful Kickstarter and had nine months of manufacturing ahead of them before anything shipped. Those people need to keep taking orders during the gap, and nothing was built for that. ShopLocket became the pre-order layer for funded hardware projects, which is a much better business than selling buy buttons to hobbyists.

The acquisition followed from exactly that. PCH International, Liam Casey's supply chain company spanning Cork and Shenzhen, bought it on 24 January 2014. PCH already manufactured and shipped for hardware startups and already ran an incubator called Highway1, so putting a checkout at the front of that pipeline was a clean fit on paper. The homepage title changed to "ShopLocket | A PCH Company" and stayed that way until the end.

~ the record ~

~ the eleven day warning ~

On 19 June 2015 the homepage became a letter. "I am writing to let you know that we have decided to discontinue the ShopLocket.com embedded ecommerce tool on June 30." Further down, in an FAQ answering the question "What is the absolute last date that I can use ShopLocket," the same page said: "We will be turning off access on June 30, 2015." The letter dates itself without a dateline, because it promises help "throughout the next 11 days."

What replaced it, by the letter's own account, was media. "Going forward, we are focused on developing unique content that supports the startup community," followed by an invitation to subscribe to the PCH Hardware Weekly newsletter and an offer of a dozen hackathons around the world. A payments product with live merchants on it was retired in favor of a newsletter and an events calendar, and the letter is signed off by the two founders by first name.

My own distance from this one is a regional detail the letter supplies itself. ShopLocket ran on Stripe. Stripe did not operate in Turkey in 2015 and it still does not. A Turkish maker in 2014 with a finished product and an audience could read every word of ShopLocket's marketing and still not be able to take a single payment through it. The pre-order gap it was built to close was a gap that only existed in countries where the payment rails were already there.

~ the export that was not one ~

The FAQ is where the shutdown gets uncomfortable, and unusually honest about it. Orders could be downloaded as a CSV. Products could not: "Unfortunately, there is no way to export details about the products you've set up." Merchants sitting on pre-orders they had not yet charged were told that PCH could not keep the service running past 30 June and that they should log into Stripe and charge those customers by hand, one profile at a time. Eleven days' notice, and a manual billing run on somebody else's dashboard.

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