Hello loves,
Note – the Kickstarter for the pins I mentioned in my last post was successfully funded. Thirty-one lovely people helped make the second collection a reality.
As you know, I’ve dedicated several posts to trying out alternatives to Etsy. The first iteration of my Etsy shop started around 2009 and was open until 2013 when I rebranded. When I put the recent shop in vacation mode months ago (June 2023), my combined sales totaled 33. Given the multitude of changes that Etsy has gone through over the years it became very difficult to justify maintaining the shop. I paid more in fees than I made. No matter how many people asked me if I had an Etsy store and I directed them there it didn’t translate to anyone buying anything.
I’m not particularly enamored with Hustle Culture, which I fully admit, I fell into years ago. I loved the idea of turning my hobby into a business. It just took me an age to realize the ideology being promoted was toxic to my well-being.
It’s only been in the last six months that I have been able to let go of most of the Hustle Culture mentality. However, my views on Etsy remained. For me it isn’t worth maintaining a store front that is clearly not being given the same views – be it because I didn’t pay for marketing to be put at the top of search lists or a lack of promotion on my part, it doesn’t matter. The cost far outweighs the benefit of a non-existent built in (for me) audience.
I did try creating a page here to sell things but honestly it was clunky and not all that appealing. I did look other popular selling platforms. None of them really clicked with me. Then a few days ago I caught up with Ana’s adventure of reducing her ink stash to 100 bottles on The Well-Appointed Desk – the post I happened to be reading featured a link to the shop where she listed all the inks awaiting new homes. Now, I’ve visited the shop before but never paid much attention to the actual platform. This time I did. I’d heard of BigCartel ages ago but never really looked at it.
Imagine my surprise at finding a platform that actually had a free “subscription” that essentially lets you try the very basics of what the platform offers and if that’s all you need – Great! They don’t charge listing fees or processing fees (those come directly from your payment processor Stripe/Paypal-which is normal) so unless you opt to upgrade to one of two other plans, the platform doesn’t charge you a single thing. So there really isn’t a downside to signing up and creating a shop. And that’s what I did after a day of researching the platform.
The shop went live yesterday with four out of five listings allowed. I don’t mind having only one image per listing. Even on the free plan I could integrate my preferred shipping. (I use Pirate Ship.) The only thing I can’t do on the free plan is track inventory and I have to manually mark when an item has sold out (like a painting). I updated various links here and shared the shop on my personal Facebook page.
Turns out that not being able to track inventory and manually having to mark things as sold is something that bothers me – the mere idea that a single item sells twice before I get the chance to change the status sends shivers down my spine. (And I lost sleep over it.) So, I did some math this morning. I compared the cost of what I was currently paying + the next subscription level of BC to just upgrading WP and using their e-commerce platform. Upgrading BC was the less expensive option by a lot (to me).
The only reason I considered this at all is because of my Patreon. The funds I get from Patreon pay for my yearly blog subscription among other things. If it weren’t for the anxiety of accidentally overselling, I would happily stick with the free subscription because it does everything I really need.
So, the search for an alternative to Etsy has come to an end. If you are interested in getting one of the Fandom Llama enamels pins from the Kickstarter, they are now available in the shop.
Loose Endings Studio 