Why We Left Etsy For Something Better!

We started on Etsy just like a lot of small makers do. It really helped us get our feet wet. But eventually we moved on and today we're going to share why and what we use now. [Music] What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do it build it or make it? So do we. This is not going to be an Etsy bash. Etsy has its place. But we are going to give you the facts, fees, and features and show you what made sense for our business as we grew. So, if you're wondering why your Etsy shop feels stuck, or if you're debating whether you should have your Etsy shop or your own website, or you're ready to take control of your brand, this is going to be a good video for you. Let's talk about the differences between Etsy and say Shopify. So, Etsy is an online marketplace. This is more like a busy craft show, a craft fair, farmers market or a mall. It's got the foot traffic. It's already got the customers, but again, the mall and the the farmers market, they're going to set the hours and what you can and can't do. And you're competing against other stores. You're just one of another other stores in this marketplace. You're more like a shelf in an aisle, whereas Shopify is your own store. So, you get to control your branding, your hours, your shipping rates, your fees. You get to control every aspect and setup of your own store. This is more like a boutique, a standalone boutique. You set up your little shop on Main Street versus putting up a little kiosk in the mall. But your standalone shop requires you to bring in the customers. You have to bring in the foot traffic. Now, if you've had an established Etsy presence, you've got reoccurring customers. You have people that know your brand. You just have to get them over to your online store. Let's talk fees and pricing. Here's a big difference here, too. Well, it's probably the first thing you're thinking about. Is it going to cost me more to have my own website? I know that's what you're thinking. So, for Etsy, the fee breakdown is 20 cents per listing, which you will have to renew every four months if your listing stays out there that long. six and a half percent transaction fee, 3% payment processing fee, and in some cases ad fees up to 15% depending upon the size of your store. 21 like advertising fees. Yes. The advertising that they're doing for you. Yes. Now, to compare that with your own website, again, we're using Shopify because that's what our website is and that's what we know. We're going to compare that to Shopify, which is a base monthly subscription fee of $29. That's your base starting out, and that's how we started out. We're on a higher tier now, but that's how we started. 2.9% processing fee for your payments versus the 3%. And then there are optional apps for Shopify. So, we did not start with optional apps, but we use them today. So, that's what another great thing about having your own online store. It does grow with you. The apps are great though because they have shipping apps, they have advertising apps, they have um giveaway apps, they have apps that will do the SMS for you. So, they manage our workshops there. There's just so many different add-ons and features where you can grow your business and evolve over time. So, a good example, if you're selling about $1,500 a month on Etsy, you're paying about $200 in fees. On your own Shopify store, we're paying about $50 to $60 in fees. Now, that doesn't include our advertising, and that varies depending upon what we're advertising and when. So, if you're selling just a few items a month, Etsy might be great. That might be the sweet spot for you. But if you start to grow, I would say any more than $500 a month or any more than, I don't know, 50 orders a month, it might be time to start looking on branching out and actually securing your own brand. Let's talk branding and customization. On Etsy, it's very limited. All sites look the same. They have the same format, same font, same layout, same checkout experience. uh you have limited control over your own marketing funnel and very little ability to do cross sales or even upselling. Now on Shopify the sky's is the limit. Uh you can add your own theme font layout. You can design your own checkout experience. Do you want to add a popup to collect some email addresses or some uh phone numbers? That's easy to do. That's a plugin. Um freebies and giveaways. Freebies and giveaways. That was one of the things that we wanted to do on our own website that Etsy was limited to. We We wanted to be able to go on some podcasts, promote ourselves, and then be able to offer some freebies to send them to our website to get them into our marketing funnel. But we couldn't do that using Etsy. So being able to do that and offer bundles and stuff on our website really gave us the opportunity to increase our sales and to increase our own customer base. The great thing is Etsy will do all that for you in the very beginning when you're new. They really help you out. You can put some products out there. There's not a whole lot of thinking to it. get some visibility. But that visibility is going to come from people landing on a product and scrolling down to see what similar products are out there. And usually those are other vendors. And sometimes that's how they find you and sometimes that's how they leave you. And once you start growing and start shipping out some orders, you have the option now to throw in a little marketing card with your website so that you can start collecting email addresses so that you can retarget these customers. That's what you want to do. That's how you're going to these people already purchased from you. They love your product. You want to be able to share with them more products that you offer and get them to come back. And to do that, you need to collect their email addresses, which you really can't do on Etsy, but you can do on your own website. You can start with putting your marketing materials and the orders that you ship out. Make a transition. So, that's a great transition into who owns the data. Now, if you're talking Etsy, Etsy owns the platform. They own the data. You don't have the ability to send out your customers an email with updates and information. You can't export a customer list. They own that information. So on Etsy, your customers are Etsy's customers. True. And the other I don't know how many of you have experienced this. Etsy can shut down your site without warning or even by mistake. So there I've seen it happen. Yes. Contrastly, if you're thinking your own website and Shopify, you do own that customer experience. You own the emails. You own the relationship. One of the other great add-ons that we use that has really um boosted our marketing funnel. Yeah. Well, and and sales are little text reminders. We use a text app that'll let you know updates on your orders, which are awesome because people feel like we are communicating with them. They know that our order will be shipping soon, that your order just shipped out. We get little thank you replies. Um but also, we can send out texts that says, "Hey, it's Mother's Day coming up. Consider giving a door hanger." little reminders that let people think about your product and say, "Oh, yeah, it's a great idea. My mom would love a door hanger." Well, you know what's really great about that is that it's all automated. We don't have to do anything. Sometimes it'll ask us, "Hey, you want to run a sale? Mother's Day is coming up." Yes. That's it. Yes. Yes. That's what makes your business. Your email list is your business. If your business changes, you still have an email list. That is what's most important. When people buy companies these days, sometimes they're buying that email list. Yeah. They want the contacts. They already know that you know their product and you have a an audience that is interested in what you're selling. That leads us to marketing and discovery. On Etsy, it's a little more difficult. You do have some control over your SEO. You have your tags, your titles, and some descriptions. and they do drive traffic to Etsy. Etsy drives traffic to Etsy, but once they get there, you're kind of competing against dozens, if not hundreds of other people's selling a similar, if not the same product. They also control the search algorithm, which can change at the drop of a hat. Whatever they decide to change it to, whatever they want to ramp up and and start to offer more of, you might lose traffic or gain traffic. Who who knows? And their policies, their policies also keep changing. If you haven't heard recently, they've also recently changed policies. They got a bunch of people up in arms. Now, comparing that to Shopify, there is no built-in traffic. So, you do have to drive traffic to your store, as we've said. So, your email list is important, your social ads as you run your Facebook ads. But if you've been building that Etsy shop, again, put those postcards in there that get people to come to your website or your join your email list, do little giveaways, things like that because like Garrett said, collecting those email addresses are like collecting gold. So, they're going to be super useful for you again as your business grows so that you can retarget those customers. What else? Well, one of the big reasons that I like Shopify is because I can pack my entire site full of SEO. I'm not just listing my product with my tags and titles. I can also make blog posts that I can then make Google ads on. I can make a blog post that I go back through Etsy and I pin those blog posts. I can pin my own products. It's just it's so much more flexible. I have a lot more control over what I'm able to put in there for my search engine optimization. And you can grab things like location, demographics, male, female, different things like that that you can't necessarily get from an Etsy shop, but you can control those things on your own website. So, to focus on scalability and growth, I know we've already mentioned it, but let me hit my bullet points here. For Etsy, uh it's a great place to start. there is limited scalability, uh, limited ability to add new features and functions, and a limited ability to add customer tracking behavior. So, if you're selling under $500 a month, it's a great place to get started, a great place to test new products, see what sells, learn how to start shipping your products, and really just get started on selling for your craft business. Yeah, it's a great learning experience to know if you actually want to try to make this a business or a side hustle. But if you're now selling over $500 a month and your business is growing, in order for it to continue to grow, you're really going to want your own website and use something as we do like Shopify that can grow with you. So, you can add features like subscriptions, affiliates, wholesales, be a part of the collective. So we can have other people's products sold on our website that just looks part of our product offering, but really they control the inventory and they ship it out. It's kind of like internal drop shipping. It is a little like that. And Shopify has become truly the central hub of our business. We not only use it to list our products and sell in our online store, but we also use it in our workshop area here. If we add on features within a workshop, we use it at our craft shows. We use the point of sale app. So, we don't use Square anymore. We now use the Shopify Square. We use it for inventory management. We use it for obviously marketing. We've talked about that. So it can really grow and become I mean we really use it in every aspect Yeah. of our business. Yeah. So I just wanted to really share how these things can grow. Your own website can grow with you where you might just get stuck in Etsy with limited growth. You've hit that ceiling and you're not really sure why your store is not growing. Spinning your wheels. Why we made the switch and never looked back. We outgrew Etsy's limitations. Now, Shopify offered more profit per sales, full creativity and customer control, and tools that actually grew with our business. So, think about your long-term goals. Don't build your whole business on someone else's platform. Don't let someone else own your business. Start small if you have to, but make a plan to grow into something that's your own. Etsy will continue to change and update its policies. Your business is changing, so why not make the switch now? Do you sell on Etsy? What has your experience been? Leave me a comment down below. And if you don't sell on Etsy, what platform are you using? Well, I am about out of time. I got to go update my store, put some more products in there. But a big thanks to the Make It Mafia. We love you guys. And that is the best way to support this channel. And in fact, we had this same conversation over there on Patreon. And we had it with our master at tier back when there was another controversy with Etsy and everybody was panicking about Etsy and they're like, "Ah, what do I do?" So, we gave them a quick breakdown of some of their options that they were able to obtain. We went deep into Shopify just to show what it is that we're using and what things you can do on Shopify. I mean, it's really about the apps. the the apps and the easy plug-in and integration with the apps is really why I love Shopify. And if you want more business type content, that is what our master tier is really all about. It's not only what you're getting in the made it tier and the free SVG files and the exclusive SVG files, but you get even more exclusive content and more topics around growing your business. We try and do once a month during our Zoom calls at least 20 minutes of some sort of business topic that gets you thinking about how you can grow your business. This one's you. Oh, not you. If you're spinning your wheels too much, maybe it's time to vroom over to get your own website. That was bad.