I am interested in this site, because I am having trouble with ETSy. I am not sure where to even start. Could you point me to some reading so I can get a general idea of what goes on here. I also want to make sure that there are a lot of people that come here for arts and crafts. That is what Etsy is known for. I think you can sell anything here and I want to make sure it isn’t flooded like eBay.
Again, interested in a good arts and crafts section.
Hi, @nelsonmay .
To clarify, Etsy is a marketplace with a wide range of active customers, which gives your store the advantage of being discovered by Etsy’s already available customer base. Shopify, on the other hand, is different as we are an ecommerce platform that allows businesses to create a customized online store. Our platform may align with your needs if you’re looking for more control over the design and content of your website. Unlike selling on Etsy, which can be distracting to customers as they may be presented with similar products from other sellers, when you have your own online store customers will only be looking at your products alone.
Just a note however, that with having an independent website that you run on an ecommerce platform like Shopify, marketing your online store is needed as this will help drive some traffic to your store. A solid marketing strategy will help with reaching potential customers and, hopefully, bring those sales in for your store. Our blog here will give you a bit of an idea of some of the marketing strategies you can look into implementing on your store.
If you haven’t already, I also recommend trying out our platform on our free trial, as you’ll be able to see firsthand what Shopify offers. From there, you can decide for yourself on whether or not our platform will suit your business’ needs. When you’re on our free trial, just a note that you can follow our video tutorial along, which will help you set up the main aspects of your store.
In the meantime however, check out our resources below to further help you get to know our platform a bit better:
As a former store owner, I 100% recommend having a home base (website, like you’d create with Shopify) to grow your brand and business.
We started by selling on Amazon, then after proof of concept created a Shopify store, and expanded to other marketplaces.
Once you have your own store, you have your own customers, a place to share your creativity, a place that only includes your brand and your products, without advertisements to other products (like on Amazon, Etsy, etc), and your own website… so if a marketplace decides to delist you for any reason, you still have your home site and thus your business.
We use this Etsy integration app to automatically import our Etsy orders to Shopify, so all orders can be managed in 1 place.