Why do you need your own website?
Etsy is great to get started. It’s free (unless you pay for advertising) and you can get a feel for how to photograph, price, what sells, who your client might be, etc. It is also a place where customers are looking for unique hand made products so it’s already narrowed down to your potential audience.
Once you start having sales, what’s next? If you really want to build your business and not work hard from scratch for each sale, you need to build your loyal customer base and here is where Etsy is problematic.
Scenario one:
You sold a product on Etsy to a customer who LOVES it and wants to buy more for their friends.
Scenario two:
You are selling in a craft fair, handing business cards or maybe have a tag attached to your product with your company name and web address.
Scenario three:
You hear more and more from marketers about creating an email list. Maybe you sign up to MailChimp…
So now you send these potential loyal customers that you worked very hard to find back to Etsy. They will be bombarded with a lot of products that resemble yours (it’s Etsy’s job to offer their buyers products that they think they will like). Yes, there is a chance that they will be loyal and buy from you but, they might also go down the “Etsy rabbit hole”.
Last but not least, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. What if Etsy changes their algorithm, raises the prices, puts limits that are hard for you to work with, gives more freedom to competitors….If you have your own website
That is why you also need your own website!!!
When you start your own site, you can have something very basic but I would recommend having the following:
- An option to buy on the site, so that you don’t have to send them to Etsy.
- An option to register to a newsletter, so that you start building your customer list.
- A blog section. This is an investment in the future so that Google’s search engine will pay attention to your site.
Short term
- To send your email subscribers to
- To send your tradeshow visitors to
Long Term
- Get more traffic with SEO
- Get more paid traffic
When comparing website options, you want to compare
- Price
- Ease of use
- Order management handling
- Possible interface with Etsy (so you don’t have to load products twice)
- SEO
- Blogging
Candidates
- WordPress with woocommerce (see this article breakdown for solution)
- Mailchimp website
- Foursqaure
- Wix
- Shopify (see this review)
- Zibbet
- Strikingly
- pattern by etsy (see this article)