Starting with Etsy & eBay
Before you listen to any freelancer or agency’s promises to help you, you should help yourself. This includes us here at Ecom for Artists, by the way.
All of our partners are *required to set up shops in online marketplaces before we venture into paid advertising.
Some may ask why this is. It’s a good question with a couple answers.
First, online marketplaces are platforms made for the little guy.
I remember getting into ecommerce with no money and putting together what little I had to order products and start a shop. Starting with limited funds is a reality for many others as well, and I want to make sure this site provides a starting point that is realistic for most artists. Not having capital is a poor excuse to sit-out and not start your online shop.
Second, in the most basic sense, online marketplaces make ecommerce easy. They act like online shopping malls where people wander and shop. People don’t have to drive traffic to their shop. And they don’t need to trouble themselves with building a custom website, or learning how to run ad, or understanding Google Analytics. It simply lets them focus on creating and listing products.
Think of it like this:
A kindergartener learns basic addition and subtraction. By the time they reach third grade, they may be learning or have learned multiplication and division. By middle school, forms of algebra or pre-algebra are introduction. And in high school, they’ll encounter trigonometry and calculus. Each is a building block upon the next. It’s in simplifying the focus students are able to learn things, one part at a time.
Translated to business – Craigslist is like addition and subtraction. A person can buy and sell to a small local market without concerning themselves with advertising costs, quality product photography, enticing product copywriting, etc. It’s a barebones platform.
Etsy, meanwhile, is like something like multiplication and division. It offers slightly more tools and options than Craigslist but you won’t be asked to dive head-first into trigonometry and advanced calculus. These sites keep selling user-friendly, meaning you’ll have just enough variables to start but not so many that you’ll feel overwhelmed and suffer from Paralysis by Analysis.
Make sense?
Below are a few more core-benefits of online marketplaces, and why it’s wise to start your ecommerce journey there.
Low Setup Costs
Etsy allows you to start your shop for .20 cents. eBay, likewise, largely charges you only after you make sale.
Compare that to Amazon where opening a seller account costs $40/month (as of early 2020). Meanwhile, owning your own website and selling there will cost you money to purchase a domain and most likely $30-$50/month for ecommerce subscriptions on platforms like Squarespace or Shopify (two of the most popular). If you’re just starting, you will want to minimize your expenses during your learning phase.
Free Traffic & Trust
There’s a reason Superbowl commercials cost millions of dollars. The price to show your goods in front of a large number of eyes is a valuable commodity that commands a hefty price.
Etsy, if used properly, will provide you a baseline level of traffic for free. Some take this for granted, but once you start paying for traffic you will understand how valuable this is.
Moreover, you won’t have to learn skills such as SEO optimization or even know what SEO stands for. You won’t have to learn about Facebook Ads or Google Ads or pay for Instagram shout-outs (if you don’t want to). The platform does much of the work for you.
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Marketplaces come with a certain level of trust built into them. What does this mean? And why does it matter?
Essentially, trust is lubricant to market exchange. It’s the secret oil that allows the people to trade money with ease. It was for this reason many people believed online business was impossible decades ago – because who would buy from someone they didn’t know through a digital ad?
Funny how old predictions appear in hindsight.
But the point of trust cannot be understated. When shoppers come onto Etsy’s site, they immediately increase their willingness to buy because they know Etsy is there to protect them in case something goes wrong. In this way, Etsy facilitates exchange and your chances of sales increase.
We will share our own account of this powerful effect.
When we moved our first store off Etsy to a private-label site of my own, I thought my work was over. I had developed an entire catalog of products. I knew each could sell because they had sold before. And I knew the proper prices and sales I’d need to use to entice buyers.
Or so we thought.
It turns out business is never that simple. The one variable that changed was our hosting platform. Switching from Etsy to my own private website reduced trust. I didn’t have an established brand name and, as a result, my conversion rate fell drastically from roughly 3 percent to below 1 percent.
This meant whereas I once sold 3 products for every 100 views, I now sold 1 product for every 100 views. If you’re new to ecommerce, this may not seem large – but trust us when I say it’s quite a difference.
Product Testing
We learned an important lesson in our first sales job out of college.
“A bad salesman who talks to 100 people a day will out-earn a good salesman who talks to 1 person a day.”
In Etsy, think of your products are salesmen. They are creating an offer and pitch to every visitor who comes to your shop page. Understand this, and you’ll see generating traffic is merely step one. Step two is enlisting an army of salesmen.
Create more products. Create. More.
The cost to do so is minimal. And the upside is infinite.
Say you sell 1 product ($10) per day from a 10-item portfolio. Boost your portfolio size to 100 and you’ll naturally have $100 revenue per day instead. It’s not rocket science.
Second, and most importantly, if you’re in the exploration/development phase of your business, you have no idea what works and doesn’t work. So test, test, test. The success and magic of business exists in this activity.
Online marketplaces provide the best way for you to do so. More will be stated on this later — but it’s important to test and find your winners here rather than via your own site.
Market & Competitor Visibility.
For a student of ecommerce, online marketplaces are hubs of valuable information.
No joke, Etsy’s default settings allow visitors to see your sales history. I kid you not. This means you can go to a shop, click on its sales, and view exactly what it sold. You can also identify which products sell the most, which sold most recently, and more.
This degree of transparency is unbelievable.
Now, in Etsy’s defense, this setting can also be toggled off. But, even then, there are still ways to identify winning products with massive potential.
More will be written on this subject below. But, I hope, the point is clear.
Marketplaces let you see into what works and what doesn’t. What sells and at which prices.