e-commerce

I’m curious to know what many of the members here use to sell their work. I know lots of people use Etsy. I’ve also looked into Big Cartel and Shopify.

Any users want to share their experiences, good and bad?

Thanks,
j

Log in to reply   8 replies so far

Nobody does this?

a better question for the etsy / big cartel forums……

I guess business-type questions aren’t meant for this site.

I don’t know about the other options like etsy and I don’t have a shop at this point, but I’ve set up a shop on Shopify.

It’s a very easy interface. You need to get another service that processes credit cards or you can use Shopify’s solution but you’ll probably pay a little more in fees.

You can opt for the lowest option. Can list 100 items or less. Costs $25 a month to maintain your shop but they take 2% of your transactions. The more you pay in fees, the more items you can list for sale and the less they take in transactions.

Hope this helps.

Etsy is a killer way to start out. Low to no commitment (no recurring fees, pay as you list or re-list at 20 cents a pop), small fee, works nicely with Paypal.

I’ve seen Big Cartel start to gain steam, but I don’t think it has nearly the same amount of traffic as Etsy. And if you’re looking at shopping solutions that are separate from your own website, then traffic is the name of the game. Who cares how cheap your cost per transaction is if you can’t convert your visits into sales? So, for me, Etsy is what I began with and what I like to use. Relist 5 times per day and you’ll get over 1,000 hits per month easily, with a fair to moderate bounce rate. That’s $30 there and it doubles as advertising.

That said, there is almost too much choice on Etsy, and you’d do well to work at curating a store in order to stand out.

James
Vrooooom Press
www.vrooooom.org

James I think you hit the nail on the head. Esty seems like an effective marketing tool while Shopify would be more of a transactional tool.

At Lead Graffiti we use Shopify, but the monthly charge eats into the profits a bit more than we like. We also use it to make up one-off bills for clients that want to pay by credit card for printing jobs which has been useful. They just click and pay.

The fee structure of Etsy is what has stopped me from using them, but with the low volume I’ll be starting with, maybe it does make sense to go that direction. Big Cartel is appealing because I’d prefer to have the store run from my own site, but that requires more marketing effort. As James said, Etsy is so crowded, it might be hard to stand out anyway.

Maybe the answer is to do something so horrible it ends up on Regretsy!