Nantucket Chronicle Marketplace is a site reserved exclusively for Nantucket Island based sellers: retailers, artisans and artists.
(prHWY.com) December 14, 2012 - Nantucket, MA -- NantucketChronicle.com has announced that its new e-commerce page, the Nantucket Chronicle Marketplace featuring
Nantucket Island vendors and artisans, will launch on November 15, 2012.
Nantucket Chronicle Marketplace is a site reserved exclusively for Nantucket Island based sellers: retailers, artisans and artists. It will provide a platform for those sellers to conduct internet sales all year long to people elsewhere in the United States (the site is limiting shipping to the lower 48 states).
Nantucket is an island thirty miles off the coast of Cape Cod in southeastern Massachusetts. It has a long and storied history, reflected in its extraordinarily well-preserved streets, lanes and houses. According to the Steamship Authority, which runs its main ferry service, Nantucket receives over 400,000 visitors annually, almost all during the summer, with recent extensions into the "shoulder season" of a few weeks before and after. Until now, the selling season for merchants on the island has been limited to that period.
Now, the Nantucket Chronicle Marketplace will be a way for Nantucket sellers of all kinds of goods to reach new buyers as well as prior customers, who might already be familiar with their products but who may have forgotten their name. Sellers provide photographs of their products, which need not explicitly make reference to Nantucket but which are unlikely to be easily found elsewhere, a description of the product and the seller's store or studio. NantucketChronicle.com posts, indexes and promotes the Marketplace, takes care of processing credit card and other payment methods, notifies a seller when an item is purchased, and pays the seller the sale price (which includes shipping) less its fee, upon receiving confirmation that the item has been shipped.
NantucketChronicle.com itself is a new website, having launched just before Memorial Day, 2012 with the slogan of "by Nantucketers, for Nantucketers." Since launch it has attracted almost 19,000 unique visitors. NantucketChronicle.com is modeled economically on an extremely old Nantucket business: the whale ship, by which Nantucketers made their livings until the mid 19th century. NantucketChronicle.com is a revenue-sharing site, which means that although none of its participants is salaried, everyone, from the owner to the Captains of Departments to the Mates and Seamen who are occasional contributors, potentially earns a share of its revenue. Up to this point that revenue has consisted of advertisements from local businesses, but with the launch of Nantucket Chronicle Marketplace an entirely new source of revenue will be developed.
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