(an excerpt from my e-book, Beyond Your Shop.)
Although there are many things about it that I feel are not in the best interest of you and I, as sellers, I still like Etsy. It’s a beautiful site. And, it’s a nice, solid method for customers to use to pay you (though, not my favorite method).
But, Etsy has simply become enormous. The millions of visits it receives each month do not translate into a million visitors to your shop or mine, unfortunately.
However, even more importantly, your Etsy shop is not owned by you. It’s owned by Etsy. You are essentially renting a little piece of property, and then parking your entire business on top of it. And so, when you rely solely on Etsy for your business, you are putting yourself at its mercy.
When the rules change, we really don’t have any say. When it gets too crowded, we’re out of luck. We can’t really blame Etsy…after all, Etsy is a business, not a democracy. We can join the masses and complain in the forums and groups, and sometimes a little complaining does make us feel better, but you know what it doesn’t do?
It doesn’t help us sell more of our stuff.
It’s really easy though, to get stuck in the Etsy hamster wheel. When we’re focusing on our shop, it’s harder to think outside the box, and we automatically spend more time doing Etsy-specific “marketing.”
Things like:
* Creating treasuries.
* Posting products in forums and group pages.
* Following other sellers (hoping for a return follow).
* Constantly re-listing (to get more views).
* Changing tags over and over (to get views from different people).
* And so on and so on.
When we get caught up with doing these things, we are making ourselves dependent on Etsy… and we’re keeping ourselves stuck, trying to sell to other sellers.
To make things worse, many of these things end up becoming a giant time suck…and much of the time, the extra views generated don’t even lead to actual sales.
But, even when they do get sales, they still need to be done over and over again. It’s a lot of time and energy, with little reward.
It’s the Etsy hamster wheel.
Why should you do a bunch of work to build up a shop that you don’t even own? What if you were to put that energy into your very own unique marketplace, custom-built to showcase your products, and show them to customers, not other sellers? A marketplace that will build on itself, and continually bring you traffic and customers….no re-listing, renewing, or re-paying necessary?
Break free from that hamster wheel, and suddenly a limitless expanse of potential awaits your business.