Life without Etsy

Etsy feels like an addiction.

If you are an Etsy seller, and feel like you are banging your head against a wall, and spending all your precious free hours there, then this blog post by Jessica Doyle is worth reading.

I closed down my Etsy shop just before Christmas, and the main reasons I did so (or at least have claimed to) were that I wanted to put my all efforts into running and promoting my own ecommerce site I built on Zen Cart. However, there is (as with most things) more to it than that.

Below is the original post I wrote on my old Blogger account explaining the reasons why I closed my Etsy Shop

However, my additional reasons were thus. It all started with the Black Friday sale. As Etsy advocated, I offered free shipping, discounts,  I changed all the tags in my shop, I changed my shop announcement and descriptions, I addded my shop to their Black Friday posts in the forums and on the Storque  (well in advance of the Black Friday weekend sale).  I did EVERYTHING they suggested and more. Then, when the time came, I looked at all their Etsy Finds with excitement and avidly scanned all the Etsy emails. I was never there. That didn’t surprise me, and I took it with wry good humour.

However, that didn’t last when I kept finding the same sellers featured over and over again, and sometimes more than once within the same feature article and one in particular no less than six times.  Sellers that were very successful, and who in truth, certainly did not need the promotion.  I was enraged. I thought of all the hours I had spent on there, pimping my shop, relisting, promoting on and off Etsy, editing my tags, my descriptions, offering sales, free shipping and everything else I could think off. I decided enough was enough, closed my shop and wrote the blog post announcing my decision.

Once I had closed my shop  I felt a huge weight lifted, and a sense of relief and freedom. Since then I have painted a lot more, started playing my flute again, and reading more. I have gained no more or less sales from my own shop than I did when I was active on Etsy.

All good things…

I have closed my Etsy Shop.

So, this is the skinny. I got a bit fed up with Etsy and decided to call it a day. The whys and wherefores are unimportant now. BUT..I had been thinking about it a for a long time anyway for many reasons, so it was not a knee jerk decision. Etsy is  too hard a nut to crack as an artist, and I started to feel that my art was suffering for it as I spent way  too much time on there, listing, promoting, pluggin, renewing. Additionally, much of my art became about what would appeal to others, and not what appeals to me. Also, the cost of renewing was not justified by my sales, and I am becoming concerned about how much time I spend on the net, and not with my little girl. This was the original reason I took a sabbatical from deviantART.

So, I have decided to go it alone. I have my own shop I built on zen cart over a year ago, and considering how much work it took, it was pretty naughty of me that I have done so little with it. It is called Art4Sale: Illusio Creative. It is a full on, all singing, all dancing, top notch ecommerce site. Hosted on a secure server, and at the moment,  Paypal is the primary payment method. I will incorporate the credit card facility later next year. At the moment I am listing all my stuff on there, have done quite a lot, still a lot to go. Until Christmas and the new year I am offering Free Shipping. But, I am not really promoting it or trying to sell. What I am trying to do, is to get people to register on the shop and subsribe to the newsletter, so that customers and subsribers can be made of aware or the big relaunch, new work and new ‘Special Offers’.

I will still be spending time on Etsy. I have made too many lovely friends there to leave, and will still be buying gorgeous handmade stuff, and hanging out with my mates in the UK forum.

So, wish me luck, and do take the time to have a poke around Art4Sale: Illusio Creative. Feedback is good, and don’t forget to register.