I think sometimes we forget what an incredible advantage it is to do business in this day and age. Although we often get no peace because we’re almost always available, we also have the unlimited potential to do business all over the world very easily.
Thirty years ago, or even twenty years ago, my card business would be very limited to my local area. Sure, I could try to get into catalogs or something, but how else would I reach some place even a couple hundred miles away? I literally ship cards all over the world almost every day, and the ability to do that is pretty incredible.
I know I personally owe Etsy a lot in this regard. It gave me the tools to start a business with a few mouse clicks. Now of course there is a lot more to it than that, but getting started and finding a way to reach people is arguably the hardest part.
I recently hit 1000 sales (yay!) which is honestly rather strange to me. I still remember the day I clicked “start your own shop” so vividly!
The other thing that’s great about Etsy is how much they have improved the site in the short time I’ve been involved. They recently added About pages and I am SO glad they did. Before there really wasn’t a way to infuse much story or process into your shop and now they have really done something special.
A slideshow, a place to write your bio and have your photo, your story, and your listings all on one nice page. Of course it was very hard to fill out — a big blank page to talk about myself, eep! – but I worked on the dodeline page over the weekend and am pleased with it so far.
In a short period, they’ve also added many other improvements:
- Direct Checkout — I still haven’t used that yet because I’m not sure I want to deal with all those little deposits into my bank account. I think it might get confusing. Have you tried that yet?
- Languages — now available in French and German. It truly is a global marketplace.
- Probably the best change — Quantities! A lot of people who shop on Etsy don’t realize that sellers had to pay for each listing AND the quantity of that listing. So if I wanted to list a card, and I had 10 of them, I had to pay $0.20 per card to list it. So instead what we all did was list one card and renew it when it sold, so we didn’t put all our eggs in one basket, so to speak. Because the listings also expire, so if I only sold 2 out of the 10, I would lose the $1.60 after three months. This has always been a headache and made it difficult for shoppers to buy two or three of any item, requiring a custom listing from the seller, and making more work. Happily, they finally fixed that! We now pay for the listing when it sells instead of when we list. Simple solution that’s so much better.
- The Etsy app is also better than ever, making it so much easier as a seller to keep up with your orders, answer convo’s, and renew listings.
- They also bought Trunkt, which had a great wholesale system for Etsy sellers. Still remains to be seen how they’ll use that, but excited to see what potential there might be for wholesale within the Etsy shop.
Are you on Etsy? Have you noticed changes as a buyer or seller and have they been better or worse?
Either way, I think as a company they are doing a good job trying to grow and improve even with their incredible success in so short a period. It’s a great reminder for all of us to never stop improving!
