Hi ho friends.
You may have noticed the entire look of this site has changed.
Have I lost my mind?
Mwhahahahaha!
As you may know, I have an Etsy shop. In the past couple of years, I’ve brought my listings over 50 and regularly promote my shop on social media on on the Etsy forms and teams. Overall, sales have picked up, but most of my sales come from exhibitions and tables at local events.
I’m a bit of a Budget Geek. I track my sales, bank fees, posting fees, commission fees, shipping, etc. Not just for the Tax Man, but also so I can play with the numbers and see how well I’m managing my business. I’ve set a milestone to re-examine the benefit of keeping my Etsy shop once my monthly fees were equivalent to paying for self-hosting on wordpress.org or upgrading my wordpress.com plan.
Etsy charges $0.20 for each item to be listed for 4 months and 3.5% commission on each sale. That’s totally reasonable for a shop with enough sales to avoid re-listing products or a small number of products. According to the Etsy gurus, if you have more items in your shop, you are considered “serious” about your business. Fifty items is generally accepted around the forms as the Magical Number that gets your shop better visibility in searches, blah, blah, blah. In the past 6 months, I noticed my Etsy bill had crept up to around $10 a month from a combination of relisting fees and commissions on sales.
I was also curious how my payments to Etsy compared to commissions paid to the local gallery that sells my prints. I collected my monthly data on sales and fees for the life of my shop from my Etsy dashboard, dropped them into a LibreOffice spreadsheet, and totaled each. I divided the fees by the sales to get the percent commission paid to Etsy. On average, I pay Etsy 31% of my sales. One of the shops with my prints gets 35%.
That told me it was time make the switch to selling from my own site. After reviewing the pros and cons of self-hosting vs keeping this WP.com site, I decided I’m not ready to make the jump to managing a WP.org site. I don’t have the skillset or time at this stage to be in charge of that. I can barely back-up my laptop on a regular schedule.
I have upgraded my WP.com plan and to celebrate, I’m changing the look of this website. Over the next couple of weekends, I’ll be making tweeks to my new site template, adding art for sale, and merging in my former life as a crafter.
So please forgive any weird things you see as you explore the site. My new template has some cool features that show up as example pages, posts, etc. I need to switch the samples out for my own things. Plus, you know, work that full-time job, make art, etc.
Stay tuned!
