Why I left Etsy | setting up a new online shop

it is 5 p.m. on Monday the 9th of March and yesterday I launched my new online shop which means I'm officially free from the cruel dirty money hungry hands of Etsy I feel like there's quite a lot to go over in this video so I'm gonna try and organize a little starting off with why I left what's made me kind of despise Etsy and then move into sort of where I've moved into how I got set up and how you can get set up there too for free might i add this also isn't sponsored everything by the way I'm just really happy with the platform that I've moved to in don't honestly don't understand why I got started with Etsy to begin with it's just so trash especially now in hindsight but let's get into why somebody's cooking something nearby it smells really good also if I'm looking down I'm repairing to my iPad for notes because I've tried to film this video like five times and yes I decided I needed to organize all of my thoughts and feelings and that now that I'm actually moved and launched this is probably the better time to sort of get all these things out I do want to start off by saying that I know that people do have quite a lot of success on Etsy I made over 2000 sales there before I finally got fed up and decided to leave but I do think that most if not all of those people would be doing a lot better on a different platform where they wouldn't be handing 20% of all their income over to etsy as well as having to pay taxes on it and etsys high fees are definitely one of the major reasons that I decided to move and already after one day on my new platform I'm definitely seeing and feeling the difference I really didn't like the way that etsys fees we're making me have to raise the price of my products and of my shipping because etsy takes a percentage of your shipping as well which is just so ridiculous to me the free shipping policy I know was the nail in the coffin for a lot of people what it suited there was make it so that unless you are offering free shipping to the United States on orders of 35 US dollars and above then you would be buried in search in favour of everyone who could and this of course is one of many things that they've done that favors the drop shipping wholesalers kind of scum that have taken over etsy because they can just offer free shipping because their products are costing them mere cents. drop shipping is a whole other rant that I think we need to have sometime soon that is a rant then I will say for another day I never joined that policy and the reason that I didn't and the reason I didn't leave then was because the overwhelming majority of my traffic was coming and is still coming from my social media accounts and from direct searches for me and my brand so that's one thing that I know annoyed me a lot of other people but because of where my traffic was coming from it wasn't really that big of a deal and I just avoided that policy all together since I wasn't forced into it unlike this new thing that they're rolling out with their advertising etsy is now changing up how they do ads so that once you've made ten thousand US dollars within a 12-month period you're automatically added to the ad policy and they will run ads for your products for you and you can't opt out of it once you've made ten thousand US dollars and I know to some people especially me a few years ago ten thousand dollars sounds like a lot but in a 12-month period that is not a lot of money we can't be paying more than that (i mean more than 10K NZD) in rent a year and we don't live right in the city so and I quote for most sellers off site ads is optional but it's a great opportunity to grow your business so all sellers will automatically be enrolled if you plan on staying on etsy you'll get risk free advertising run by our experienced team of experts and you'll only pay a fee when you make a sale so there's no upfront costs for you if you've made more than ten thousand US dollars in sales on etsy in a 12 month period you'll benefit most from off-site advertising so you'll be required to participate for the lifetime of your shop so basically any sales coming from someone who has clicked on an ad for your one of your products in the last 30 days and then has purchased something from you within that 30-day period that sale will have an additional 15% advertising fee taken off it go into etsys little pockets but once you're locked into it forever they'll give you a nice little discount of only taking an additional 12% instead of an additional 15 how nice of them so say you have a good few months from they're measuring it from the 19th of February 2020 on words is that that's when the 12 months starts so say you're have a good month or two this year that's way better than you usually do and you hit that $10,000 mark you're screwed you're stuck in this advertising policy and you cannot opt out of it for the rest of your shops life on it you're stuck in it for most sellers, etsy estimates that one in 10 sales about 10 percent of your sales will come from off-site ads in reality that's not really a lot of money but it's the it's the whole idea of it in the way they've gone about it and everything else they've done in the past that's really turning people off more and those dollars really add up for some people and also you don't really have any control over the way that they present these ads which ... no. The said in a little FAQ thing that they were pushing to all of our seller dashboards that the ads would be taken from information and images that are in your listings so you have essentially no control over how these ads will look even with my all-time sales I'm still a little bit off from reaching that but recently it has started to look like something that is quite achievable that $10,000 milestone personally don't need or want to benefit from it sees advertising services so I went to this Q&A forum that they were pushing and on there I found a lot of people who are just as upset and confused and annoyed as I was all of them are asking very good questions and providing very good criticism and the only replies that anyone was getting from the totally human staff on the other side we're copied and pasted replies that didn't actually answer anyone's questions or address any of their concerns Etsy really likes to claim that they do a lot for you one of the biggest ways that they do this is through their analytics page oh look how much traffic we're bringing you know oh look how many sales that we've made I mean that you've made look how much money that we're I mean you're making but when I took a second glance at mine I realised it was all bull so for me etsy says they're bringing in X amount of traffic or views to the page but then you can click into that and you can see where on etsys site all that traffic is coming from for me almost all of it is coming from search so I click into that and then you can see the top search terms that people are using that is leading them to my shop in the top search terms that people are using to find my shop are procrastinator co, procrastinatorco with no space between the two parts Lilynzst stickers and LilyNZST followed by lily nzst stickers and then there's a very sharp decline going into things like planner stickers, sticker sheets with only a handful of use so that decided it for me I don't need etsy why are they taking twenty percent of my income they doing anything for me all I do is introduce all these stupid little ways to make more money off us and they're not doing anything for me so now I'm on Big Cartel there are a lot of alternatives to Etsy out there and honestly I probably recommend most of them I decided to move to Big Cartel mostly because of things that I heard by word of mouth I've had a few friends moved there and they're super happy with it and they don't stress about making their rent payments anymore so I decided it was worth checking out I looked over the payment plans and was very happy with everything that I found when I was just reading over everything that they offered and then I found the icing on the cake the gold plan you can actually sign up and set up your shop and be selling stuff for free on Big Cartel their gold plan lets you have five products for free and then you can upgrade for more products and different features I signed up with a gold plan just so I could look around their back-end and I was actually really happy with what I found it's super easy to use and understand and I think if you're moving from Etsy it'll probably be something very sort of familiar and very easy to transition to the customization is great and really simple and they have tons of integrations for different things like print-on-demand selling digital products google analytics different payment methods email list sign ups and a bunch more you can also customize your storefront and have your own custom domain I was very happy so I purchased my domain via GoDaddy I'm now on the diamond plan which gives me like all the features and up to a hundred products I honestly probably could have gone with one below that but I had over the amount of products when I was moving to Big Cartel but I have since cut alot of them in the move it's okay because I do have a lot of things planned to roll out before the end of the year and that is $19.99 dollars a month I think I believe that's in u.s. because I think I've got charged like 33 New Zealand Dollars you can process payments there by a stripe and payal I'm currently still working on PayPal sorry about that by the way guys and stripe only takes about 3% per transaction and that's it so I have my plan fee with Big Cartel that is a very that is a set cost per month depending on the tier that you take and then the transaction fee for whatever payment processing service that you use that's it and overall I sat around did a bunch of math and it's a lot less than what etsy was taking from me I figured if it didn't go too well I can at least just make back what I spent and it would be all good you also don't have to use a custom domain I just decided to do that because I've wanted to for a while okay before we get to the rest of it let's get the two negative things they have out of the way first my first one is that my website will only display prices to people in New Zealand dollars that's making my products look expensive so my sticker sheets are currently 4.50 New Zealand dollars which is 2.80 US dollars so few from the u.s. buying something in u.s. dollars then there's what you'll be charged if you purchase one sheet is 2.80 US and because of this I've gotten quite a few messages over the last day (I only launched my shop yesterday) confused and concerned about how much they're going to be charged and thinking that things are much more expensive than they are my second thing is that I can't seem to be able to get rid of this featured products page on any of the themes that means that people have to click on to the products tab in order to see everything I imagine you can actually get rid of that by customizing the code I think it would be awesome to just have people go straight to everything on your homepage and to be able to change that with the simple basic theme editor all right so some more features that I like I really like how they do discounts you can have codes that are limited use which means I can now give out shop credit like I can give somebody $20 shop credit and that can't be shared around with anybody and used more than once makes it easier and safer to give out a free shipping code to my patreon members if they want to combine an order with their sticker club mail you can also control what time sales begin and end which on it see it's just kind of like this day and that day. the themes are super simple and easy to customize and you can add pages like I've added one for my sticker club and eventually I'll add an FAQ page as well the support team is also super helpful and awesome to deal with in general I was honestly super scared to leave etsy even though I was really sorta like angry and upset with them and yesterday counting down to my new site going live was just so nerve-racking but it's actually gone super well even though I haven't been processing paypal sorry about that you can accept paypal with Big Cartel I just can't at the moment due to issues I've had with them in the past but I'm working on it definitely feeling the difference that not having it is 20% fees is making already I've been able to lower my prices significantly I've been able to drop my shipping price down to what it actually costs as etsy takes five percent a your shipping so you have to account for that and I'm still making more than I was with it see being able to run sales and not having an additional 20% taken off is just so good and on that note my entire shop is 20% off right now if you use code ETSYFEES at checkout and it'll get you 20% off your entire order it's active until March 13th procrastinatorco.com. so so far I really recommend Big Cartel. Etsy just keeps making these stupid decisions that favor the trash dropshippers that have kind of taken over this site while they still try and claim to be all about the little guy and the individual independent small time maker. They're full of it. of course definitely do check out other platforms to see what will be best for you your business model and your life and all that jazz personally I'm really happy with Big Cartel already and I can see myself staying here for a long time yeah I've left etsy and I'm very happy that I've done it and it's only been a day if you want to check out my shop and have a look around see what it's like or maybe even snag yourself something its procrastinatorco.com if you liked this video and found it helpful then it'd be awesome if you dropped a like on it helps out a lot and maybe check out my other videos and subscribe if you like what I'm putting out I do tons of behind the scenes stuff about running my business while I'm also studying full-time at university studio vlog stuff this video was going to be in the form of a weird studio vlog but it was it was a mess so here we are if you have any questions feel free to drop me a DM on Instagram or just drop them in the comments and I'll get back to you as soon as possible my Instagram is @procrastinatorco and links to all of those socials my patreon sticker Club of this shop and everything will be down in the description below and that's it for now thank you so much for your time and I hope that you're having a dope day

Channel: Lilynzst

Views: 263,245

Rating: 4.9090824 out of 5

Keywords: etsy shop, etsy ads, etsy sucks, how to set up an etsy store, selling on etsy, etsy sticker shop, how to start an online shop, how to sell stickers on etsy, why i left etsy, should i start an etsy shop, etsy business, full time etsy seller, etsy fees, etsy shop tips, lilynzst, procrastinatorco, etsy alternative, free etsy alternative, is etsy worth it, is etsy free, etsy seller tips, sticker shop, bigcartel, is big cartel good, shopify alternative, dropshipping is bad, etsy

Id: xKzXn-tYdVA

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2020