Over the last couple weeks I’ve been working on migrating my shop from Pattern (run through Etsy) over to Shopify (where you’re hopefully reading this now). I did this for a few different reasons.
Now, Etsy’s marketplace is really good if you can’t drive your own traffic. People can purchase from multiple artists at once, and that convenience is really nice, but the shop isn’t very customizable so it’s hard to build a solid brand identity.
So I tested out their Pattern shop for about nine months. I spent a long time building the website itself, and I liked that the inventory was linked to the Etsy shop so whatever I did to one shop would affect the product listing and stock number for the other as well. But after my shop was already launched and active, my customization options were suddenly very lacking. I found myself unhappy with my portfolio and unable to change its layout, and I wanted to be able to add or remove pages as I please for special events I may run or commission details or whatever I decide to do in the future.
So here I am, building a Shopify. As of writing this, the domain just finished transferring from Etsy to Shopify, so its finally able to be accessed again after a weekend of being unsearchable. I’ve put notices on all my social media and have basically accepted that I will lose sales during this time, but I’m still directing people to my standard Etsy shop. I like Shopify’s customization options, although some options require some coding knowledge of which I have almost none. I paid a service to transfer all of my product listings and their full details over to Shopify so I don’t have to upload everything manually, and already I’m so glad I did that. I’m in the process of adding item collections for different product types and also themes.
I plan to keep my standard Etsy shop since they do still bring their own audience to see my work, and I don’t have to do any advertising. Pattern was $15/mo and Shopify is $40/mo, so while it is more expensive, I plan to use it as a hub for information that usually must be found by viewing social media, which I know not everyone does.
Plus, I want to write more blogs! I love getting my thoughts out like this and I want to do it more often.
