Good Idea or Bad Idea: Etsy
- Started
- Last post
- 8 Responses
- BK
I'm planning on starting a furniture design/manufacturing/sales side hustle selling primarly online.
My thought is to have my own website with all the different pieces available for purchase, but instead of adding to cart through my site it would link to Etsy for the transaction.
This way I'll maintain the branding control by offering it on my own site but won't have to handle the financial transaction myself and have an additional marketing stream of Etsy search functionality.
I figure the cut Etsy takes is about similar to the monthly Shopify fees I'd have to pay doing it all through my site.
Anyone done similar?
Good idea or bad idea?
- fadein11-1
Bad idea. Taking payments online is ridiculously easy to set up.
- noneck2
Etsy would open you up to a wider audience though.
- true yes but just do the whole thing on Etsy if doing that. Pretty hard to get noticed on Etsy also though - it's mahoosive.fadein11
- i know a ton of shops that do bothscarabin
- < thisdbloc
- just being in the Etsy search will bring customers.dbloc
- Not the best idea, but it'll work and if you're selling furniture you can expect people to be fine suffering another click. Also you get 2 SEO sets.detritus
- I actually do this on a side project, hosting a front page that links through to a big cartel site. We're changing over to full shopify soon, but ...detritus
- ... it's worked well enough for the past three years!detritus
- Shit, am on mobile. These notes are supposed to be in the post before! Doh.detritus
- ideaist2
Your best bet (relatively inexpensive, easy, supported, etc.):
https://wordpress.com/ (CMS)
https://woocommerce.com/ (Commerce)
https://woocommerce.com/storefro… (Commerce Theme)https://stripe.com/ (Payment Gateway - Online)
https://squareup.com (Payment Gateway - Offline)As scarabin said above, it's best to take a "many eggs in many baskets" approach and get out everywhere and see where your market is.
Start now and see what sticks.
- I found my house numbers on Etsy, but bought them directly from the manufacturer's site. Many baskets could be a great idea.noneck
- detritus0
My only criticism with etsy for what you're doing is that there's a lot of cheap stuff in there, and I often find myself amazed by how little people charge for items that I can only imagine cost them a lot (in time at least) to make.
If you've already compared your proposition with competing items then cool.
- ********0
Try piggybacking on top of Etsy's commerce system using Pattern. It's incredibly simple to use and manage.
- Beeswax-1
If you;re not much of a web guy go with Shopify instead of Wordpress.
I'm a web guy but I even switched from Woocommerce to Shopfy for the sake of comfort.
You don't need a fancy template for your site do you? That's the only thing that makes wordpress better for e-commerce.For receiving payments just integrate paypal and stripe.
- SteveJobs1
I'm in the middle of starting a company that will actually offer what shopify and everyone else falsely claim in their advertisements - simple and easy payment setup that take less than 10 minutes to set up. And with us that's from registration to integration, not just once you've signed up. We'll offer WP plugins as well as simple pnp checkouts (which will take literally less than 5 minutes) and lightweight shopping cart features.
Sorry this of no help to you right now, but you did just motivate me to work harder to get this done for folks like you. :)
- BrokenHD1
@stevejob's you ever do this? could use right now lol