Introducing Encore Services: A Journey of Creativity and Community

After nearly 7 years since joining Steemit, I am thrilled to finally introduce my services to this community with my first blog post. Encore Services has undergone a few changes since 2016, and I have enjoyed the journey, finally achieving my goal of making an online store that ships to your door.

During the lockdown that started in 2020, I was involved in volunteer work sending handwritten letters of encouragement, which became quite therapeutic and enjoyable. I got inspiration from other volunteers to draw pictures on the envelopes, which led me to create printable stationery sets that were available for free download on Encore Services.

Although I thought it was convenient for people to download PDF files, the overwhelming feedback from users was that they wanted to pay for printed stationery. This presented a new challenge, but after some learning and sweating, I integrated with Pudo to offer low-cost courier shipping within South Africa.

While this covers South Africa I am looking into integrating more courier options to make it easier for international deliveries but for the moment international orders must use the “local pickup” option which is the default option, and arrange with us for the trusted courier of your choice to collect your order.

Today, Encore Services is a niche Art shop currently selling matching paper and envelopes in standard sizes, expanding to more shapes and variants soon.

As I continue to grow the site and the Art sold on it, I hope to share my experience in building an online store on a bootstrap budget so that anyone can make a niche online store with their products. The plan is to blog about the platforms and plugins I am using, as well as how to overcome problems to make the creation of online stores more accessible to entrepreneurs and small business owners like myself.

I also offer my services, as a web developer, to have custom stationery and digital art commissioned for your projects, or to sell your art on my store.

Thank you for reading, and I welcome your suggestions and questions. Please Visit Encore Services to browse the current selection.