Why have I succumbed?Community! It's what Etsy is all about.
Heard a very inspiring talk by Mandy of ZillowPillows and how she's made Etsy work for her business. She talked about how it is quirky and offers different methods for shopping besides the old fashioned "category" method most of us are used to. It uses social media and connections with other people to get noticed and recommend what you like. It is indeed a true community of people helping each other be successful.
Different than having our work in galleries and other "catalog" websites, one can control how work gets seen in various photo poses we take and how it's presented and written about. Etsy's commerce site is a super-highway of web traffic and there Etsy and other artists help you negotiate ways to direct some of it to our work.
What was I waiting for?!?
Kept track of my time and it took about 4-5 hours to get a shop set up, create a shop header, anguish over the text, set-up shop info, get a premium PayPal account set up AND take photos of a few pieces to "list." The first item took an hour to list; by the fourth item it took only about 15 minutes.
The shipping piece is still a bit frightening and figure I'll "eat" some costs until I figure it all out.
TIP: even though I took all the photos at one setting, in the first piece I listed the background colors turned out a bit different in each shot after I changed the sizes to their recommended pixels, fixed contrast and SHARPENED them. When I manipulated the photos for the next few items I left all of them open in my Photoshop "project bin" so I could align their placements within the frame and make sure they all had same background tone.
Here's my new Etsy Shop: "NicePots" by Cynthia Spencer.
More to come...
granted it takes some time to get it all figured out..but then we artists are problem solvers, right. i am addicted to Etsy..it's not perfect but for what you get it's rather inexpensive..i like the way you can connect to facebook and kaboodle for adverstising in just a click,that opens up a better customer market.
ReplyDeleteyou do have to work at it to get sales..not just let your items sit after listing..list or relist every few days is important.
dealing with selling ceramics online is a bit tricky it seems..shipping too is more complicated than say jewelry..but there is flat rate for smaller items and the old stand by UPS for the larger items,rates can be calculated online but they are not completely accurate.
good luck ,glad to have you on etsy.
oh you might want to add an etsy gadget to your blog too.
ReplyDeleteNan, thanks for the tips. I made sure to get the google analytics thing going so I can watch traffic and see if there are any trend. Yes, I need to get direct Etsy links here, too! Is there a diff gadget that you mean besides just a link? Thanks for taking the time to comment and help me get going!!
ReplyDeleteNan, figured out what you were talking about...hadn't been on the dashboard set up of Blogger for a long time, but found the gadgets and made an Etsy mini. Thanks again for the tip.
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