Lol just kidding. I'm still on Etsy. That was clickbait. And the fact that I had to do that to get you to click on a blog post on my own website is exactly the problem I want to talk about.
The downside of having your own website.
Having a standalone shop is supposed to be the dream. No platform fees, no algorithm, and not having to compete with thousands of AI knockoffs of your own products listed three rows above you at a fraction of the price. BUT that also means having to drive your own traffic there. And doing that requires doing approximately one million things you're completely unfamiliar with.
It all costs money
Etsy takes a cut of every sale, which is annoying. But the alternative is paying for your own platform whether you sell anything or not. Shopify, which is what I use, starts at $39/mo for the basic plan (I get a discount by paying $384 annually). That's equivalent to 1,920 Etsy listing fees. And that's just to have the website. I'm not familiar with the other selling platforms, but all of them cost money just to be on there.
There's a lot of fun customization you can do on here that isn't available on Etsy, but that often requires 3rd party apps, most of which aren't free. Do you want product reviews? You need a 3rd party app for that (I pay $15/mo my reviews app).
Nightmare SEO
There's so much fucking shit to do on here. If you think Etsy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is hard, you're going to struggle with Google SEO.
Etsy is like Google, they're both search engines. To show up in Etsy search results, all you have to do is list your product. To show up in Google results, you have to teach Google that your product exists. That means writing meta titles and meta descriptions (turns out that has nothing to do with Facebook or Instagram) for every single product page, every collection page, your homepage, and probably other pages I don't know about. It means making sure your URLs aren't broken. It means writing blog posts like this one so Google has something to actually index (which I'm still not entirely sure what indexing is or does).
Email automations
Email marketing is valuable (or so I hear). There's these things called email automations. Which means you need to learn about welcome sequences, abandoned cart emails, post-purchase follow-ups, etc., and each one requires you to make decisions about when it sends, which customer segments to send it to, what it looks like, inside an interface that assumes you already know more than you do. Successful businesses have hundreds of different automations set up. I am not one of those. (Sign up for my emails because you'll get like 3 a year!) I have multiple apps handling different parts of this and I'm still not entirely sure they're all talking to each other correctly. When I remove a product that was used in an automation, it will pause that automation and never tell me until I find out months later.
Oh and if you want your emails to actually reach someone's inbox, the biggest thing is to have your own domain as the sending email address (like mine being Sarah@prettyrudethings.com), and setting that up felt like reading a different language. Don't know what DMARC is? Me neither.
So. Many. Google. Things.
Google has several different products that all relate to your shop, and they are all separate things that you have to set up separately, and I accidentally have each of them attached to different google account I have. 🙃
Like how you can see how many views your listings get on Etsy? There's Google Analytics for that, which requires you to get a tracking tag and put it in your shop's code, and took like a year for me to properly set up. There's Google Search Console, which tells you how your site appears in search results and whether Google can look through it. There's Google Merchant Center, which is where your product catalog lives for Google Shopping. And the dashboard on that makes me feel like a very stupid baby. And there's Google Ads, if you want to pay to show up in search results while you wait for organic SEO to kick in (and paying doesn't even guarantee you show up, because you need to SEO the shit out of the ad and it's too complicated for my stupid baby brain to do it).
Setting all of these up involves verification steps, connecting accounts, dealing with errors that appear weeks after setup when something doesn't sync correctly. For example, for some reason the weight of each product didn't sync to my Google Merchant Center, so I had to manually add the weight to hundreds of listings, which involved several steps to do just one. None of this is the kind of thing you can just do on your phone in a few minutes.
And after all of that, my Etsy still does better
I have spent easily a hundred times more hours on my Shopify store than I ever did maintaining my Etsy shop. The SEO, the redirects, the metadata, the automations, the Google everything, but currently most of the traffic that comes here is from my Instagram (which adds up to a handful of orders a week). This is what my current Shopify dashboard looks like:
I include a business card in every Etsy order with a discount code for my website. And the sticker backing card explains how impactful it is to buy from my website, that the prices are cheaper, priority processing, and lower free shipping minimums. And that works sometimes! If you first found me on Etsy and you're reading this, I love you so much (actually if you're reading this at all, I love you so much too). But most people still choose to reorder on Etsy.
I used to love seeing that little star on an Etsy order that means someone is a repeat buyer. It's a great feeling knowing someone liked a thing I made so much that they wanted to buy more things I've made. Now when I see it, I feel a little sting of disappointment, because I know that person has my website's URL on a card sitting in their house somewhere (or thrown away), and they still went back to Etsy. I get it though. Etsy is familiar and easy and they already have an account. But there's also these people, I don't understand this mentality:
Etsy has 90 million active buyers and prettyrudethings.com has like 12 (including you! 🤗). A lot of multimillion dollar successful shops that make plenty on their standalone website still have an Etsy, because it's almost passive income because of how easy little work they have to do on it, and they use it as a traffic source to their website. I would love to have the majority of my income come from this website, but right now it's still Etsy.
And don't get me wrong, there's so much wrong with Etsy besides the fees. Allowing AI slop (and not reinforcing their own rules that AI products need to be disclosed as such in the description) has been devastating. This blog talks about that more. I could go on and on, but I've been writing this for hours and this blog editor is a bitch and I've had to go into my shop theme editor like 5 times to fix how the headings look.
Before you go, since you're here, why not check out some of my new stuff? Or leave a comment that you were here and that I didn't spend hours writing into the void (I have no other way of knowing if this gets viewed because again, Google tracking tags are confusing to me). And let me know how you found this blog!
prettyrudethings.com
