Photo by Alisa Anton on Unsplash

Life after Etsy, what now?

In 2013 Etsy shot down my shop.  I could have fought it, as I was caught up in the whole Jayne Hat debacle as it is a simple Ski hat and I am certain almost every seller on Etsy had written their own pattern. But no, a friend of mine had already offered to build a website for me and so ever since I have been working on Life after Etsy.

I wish someone would have told me the following 5 things, so sit down and have some tea.

1. you have to learn to drive your traffic to your website.

   • I was lucky to have a pretty big following as back then I was one of the few “Supernatural” Vendors. That changed about 3 years ago when a certain big chain mall store, got the license and started to produce cheap Supernatural products. It has been harder ever since to get people to my site.
   • You have to be very present on social media, I do facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I just recently found out that Pinterest supposedly is also a great outlet to drive traffic to your site.
   • I use Buffer to schedule my social media posts. It’s easy and helps when I am gone for a weekend, as Buffer takes care to post for me.

2. do some research while you are still on Etsy and find another platform where to sell your products. Here are some different ones.

   • Store Envy – Free to open, they take 10%, but you do not get the traffic flow like Etsy
   • Artfire – Free same not the same traffic as Etsy
   • Shopify – $29.99/month you can connect your own domain, it is pretty user-friendly
   • your own website, my friend set me up with Word Press/WooCommerce I had no clue about website building or blogging, so I learned a lot since then. For me personally, I like this one the best. I can make my site look exactly the way I want. WooCommerce is free, there are add-ons you can pay for and also themes that are not free.

3. be prepared to learn a lot of new tech skills

   • the amount of things I learned since life after Etsy, is crazy. I learned about SEO, Keywords, CSS, how to change themes. Just a pretty decent set of skills. So if you are not willing to learn, make sure you have someone that is going to help you or you can always hire a company to set you up with a website.

4. what to tell your customers and new customers.

   • I still to this day get asked, Oh do you have an Etsy? And I just politely tell them that no, I sell from my website. It is funny how Etsy has become synonymous with Handmade. When sadly I have noticed more and more mass produced items being sold.

5. You gotta put some extra work hours in

   • Last but not least, due to having to fill so many more hats, you gotta be prepared to put in some extra hours. But in the end, it will all pay off