Pleasure doing business…

Well, most of the time.

Today I woke up to discover outrage all over the Etsy forums, because a percentage of shops have been enrolled in an “experiment” without any prior warning. Okay, I’m sure it says somewhere in the T&Cs that we’ve all agreed to this kind of fiddling about as part of our contract with Etsy, but in this particular case a bit of advance notice would have been nice. What Etsy have done is to remove all information about shipping costs until after an item has been added to the shopping cart. This is resulting in loss of sales (who wants to faff about adding things to a cart to find out information that should be part of the listing?), and for European shops, anyone involved is now in breach of EU distance selling regulations by not displaying their international shipping fees up front. There’s no way of opting out, no way of changing the situation, we just have to ride it out until Etsy deems the experiment finished and hopefully reinstates the shipping information!

I have to admit that I’ve been thinking about moving away from Etsy for a while… not because of any problems I’ve had with Etsy (until this morning!), more because I’d like to have my own store with its own design and branding, which I can’t have on Etsy. One of the strongest points about the stalls I’ve done with the Emporium in Real Life has been the branding, and that’s lost amongst all the identical-looking stores on Etsy. I’m doing what I can with my product photography, but it’s not brilliant, and I’d like my branding to be stronger.

I’ve used Big Cartel before, and I’m quite tempted to try them again – although with around 100 products in the store at any one time, their fees will be more than I’m paying on Etsy. But then I can do things like adding the different styles of zipped pouches under one listing and still retain inventory control of each different print, which is something you can’t do on Etsy. The shipping information is set up in the same way, which I like – you simply set a profile for each object. This works well, as it allows me to charge exact shipping fees, whether it’s £1 for a sewing pattern or £12 for a hat.

I’ve also been looking at Shopify – a friend has recently set up a lovely gift shop on this platform, and my husband’s using it to launch a board games shop very soon. The fees again are more than I’m currently paying on Etsy (and Shopify’s lowest monthly fee is only 99 cents less than Big Cartel’s highest!), so I’d need to be sure I was definitely going to be making enough sales to be able to cover the cost of the fees. On Etsy you pay by item rather than by month – so at least if you don’t sell anything (depressing thought), you don’t pay anything. The other down side of Shopify is that you can’t specify shipping per individual product, you have to set a flat rate based on the overall total of the order, or by the weight of the products. This simply doesn’t work when Royal Mail calculate their prices by size as well as weight – hats aren’t heavy, but they’re big, and I want them insured!

Shopify is perhaps the most professional-looking of the three though, and allows a great deal of customisation. It would also allow me to import and maintain this blog, which would be a bonus! Both Shopify and Big Cartel would allow me to use a custom domain name if I wanted to, and they both have integration which allows direct selling on Facebook. What they don’t have, however, is the huge community surrounding them which is the biggest benefit of Etsy. Admittedly I don’t get too involved in teams and forums and groups, but the fact remains that almost two-thirds of traffic to my current shop comes from within Etsy itself. And that would simply disappear if I disappeared from Etsy, which means I’d have to do an awful lot more work on marketing – which frankly is not my forté. I want to spend my time making stuff, not running a marketing campaign to sell it.

I don’t do very many stalls in Real Life, and my products simply aren’t priced to be sold in other people’s shops, so I really need my online presence to work for me in terms of actually selling the things that I make.

If anybody has any suggestions based on their own experiences, I’d be really grateful to hear them. I’m so confused right now that I don’t know what to do for the best!