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Comment by jtwaleson | Hacker News Reader

My wife has a side project selling antique maps. I built her a shopify site about 1 year ago that costs €30 p/m but it's hardly generating any revenue. I spent maybe 10 hours on it and she has spent about € 2000 on inventory. https://utrechtaandemuur.nl

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This looks good! There are some minor UX tweaks that you should do for a better starting point to the site. I'm assuming:

1. The initial site hasn't changed since launch.

2. If it has, then its been due to intuition vs data.

From my quick glance, this has potential and she should be able to sell her entire inventory €2000. It would be good to know what the digital marketing strategy has been to build awareness and drive sales from her target audience as well as a better understanding of her customer and industry.

In any case, she has something and I hope she doesn't give up.

Nuce business. I didn't see an English version of the site.

Is it accurate to assume the target audience is only Dutch-speaking people? This is cool but I haven't wanted antique maps of the Netherlands specifically.

Not just Dutch speaking but looks like it's specifically the city of Utrecht. Which is pretty specific, though the hostname tells you as much if you speak Dutch (it translates to 'Utrecht on the (your) wall').

Wondering: why did you choose to focus on one city?

Get the prints into retail spaces - book shops and boutiques.

Why not switch to WooCommerce and I host it for you for €49/year. ;-)

have you considered localizing and selling it to english speaking countries too? cool looking maps but not all that accessible.

This is very niche. I question who would really want to buy antique maps, except as for wall art.

Can you venture into other things to sell on Shopify instead?

If you were the world leader in antique maps, you’d make a pile of money from that niche. Being able to search for authentic maps for anywhere in world, sorted by time period — that would be a big hit in certain circles. You could ask who would buy first edition printed books — but that’s also a pretty large niche with lots of passionate customers. For example, I’d be interested in old aviation charts or wartime maps from World War II or the US Civil War/etc.

It's not as niche as you might think. I think the problem is that there are already lots of other websites selling antique maps. For example:

- https://www.raremaps.com/

- https://artsourceinternational.com/

- https://www.swiftmaps.com/product-category/antique-maps/

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