Fortunately, it’s not a life or death dilemma, just a ‘what do I do’ kind of quandry…
© 2010 BJ Parady
I spent the summer making a set of small pieces (small physically, smaller price) for my great fall marketing campaign. I intend to use all the social media I’ve been working with to promote the art, with the goal of selling some.
So now I’ve got around 20 pieces ready to go–except for the one above. It’s very much in the flavor/style of the series, but I’ve grown quite attached to it–so much that I may not put it up for sale. I’ve photographed them, gotten the jpgs web ready, I’m all set to go. But where?
I see two choices. One is to reopen my store on Etsy, and put them there. This is the easiest thing to do–their software makes it very easy to load new pieces. All the sales are handled by them, and it’s fairly cheap for the artist.
The other choice is to put them on my website and use Paypal for the purchases. This will involve more time on my part, although now that I’m using WordPress for my blog, I may be able to find something on there to make it easy. The Paypal process is not too bad.
In both cases I would have to handle the shipping, so that’s not at issue.
The main con for the Etsy is that I tried it before and didn’t have much luck. It’s become a very big site, and all of the sales that I made then were driven from my blog, not from Etsy….so why go back?
The main anti for on my site is the time involved–although I’m probably blowing that out of proportion, it’d only be a few hours….
What to do? Any thoughts? I know some people are anti-Paypal, but I’ve never had any issues with them…If I’m doing all of the promotions, then what do I gain by using Etsy? Will there be accidental buyers (accidental in that they came to my site accidentally)…
Or is all this dithering just my way of postponing the work until another day?
I hear ya, BJ. I got all excited about Cafepress, think they put out excellent quality merchandise and spent a lot of time setting up a store and running it by friends and the blog. I’ve had very few sales, not enough in my mind to justify the time I’ve spent. So where do I go to sell my actual quilts, not just items with the images on them? All sites available to artists seem to get too big too fast, or the categories don’t seem to fit what we do. I say do it on your website with Paypal, and keep promoting through your blog. I recently figured out that I have additional pages on Blogger so eventually will bite the bullet and start a gallery page of items for sale. Can’t be any worse than doing nothing at all!
I’ve been on Etsy for a few years and early on, it was great, but now, there’s so many people on there that if post something right now by the end of the day I’m 25-30 pages back so I don’t know why I even bother. I’m with your other friend, do it through your own website. That’s what I’m going to do with my own work. The good thing about that (for me) is that I show my art or painted shirts at our local farmers market twice a week, but I share the booth with two other artists so I can’t bring my whole efforts each time, but I can have people take my card and look at my website, or have them sign up for me to send them an email update on what I’m working on and they can purchase from my site if they’d like. And PayPal is so easy and I’ve never had a problem with them ever.
Anyway, that’s my two cents worth.
Kate
DreamrKate@yahoo.com
http://www.katepethoud.blogspot.com
I’m certainly leaning towards doing it on my website…just have to learn how to make it look the way I want….thanks for reinforcing that notion, both of you.
BTW, one of the things I can’t figure out is why I’m having to moderate your comments. I thought I had that turned off…sorry…