I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and open an Etsy shop. I’ve been mulling over these signs for a long time now and how I would go about marketing and selling them. I’ve started and stopped making an Etsy shop about a dozen times, but this week, I finally decided it was time. I opened the store with a few simple products and I hope to add more in the coming weeks. I have lots of products I’d like to offer, I just need to get some samples made up and take good pictures. It’s a process.
Etsy – My Online Shop
The easiest part of this process is Etsy itself. The tools they have setup for opening your shop make it dead simple. They will even take care of shipping calculations and labeling for you. Of course, there are fees. There’s listing fees and selling fees. If you use them for shipping, you “buy” your shipping from them and it’s taken against your balance. This is great if you want to offer free shipping to your customers by baking it into the cost.
I decided to open my shop with three basic products. Two rustic signs, and a miniature primitive shutter. I chose these three things because of the ease of manufacturing and I wanted to test the platform before jumping into selling larger or more custom orders. I do plan on offering custom signs and other products, but I needed to familiarize myself first… and more importantly, make sure that I could actually keep up with another venture.