One year ago this month, we set out on an adventure to open an Etsy Shop to sell our decals. At the time, it seemed like a good thing to do, so we put our domain on a redirect to allow visitors to go straight to our Etsy Shop and not to our own web site.
Recently, we were looking at our sales on Etsy, and even though we sold more than 100 decals in the past year, our sales figures were not enough for us to keep pursuing this venture.
Etsy has a number of fees and charges that a seller must pay in order to put product online for sale, fees for advertising, fees for selling something, shipping and sales tax fees, and well, you see what’s going on here.
In any event, even though we “made” lots of good sales and “made” a profit, the bottom line was, we didn’t even break even!
The Etsy Shop is showing a tremendous loss in it’s first year. It took us a couple of months at the beginning, to even make our first sale and then after the Etsy Fees, materials and inventory purchased, not to mention the equipment for making the decals…it will take us several years before we start to see any real profits here and start to actually make money.
So, that being said, we are closing the Etsy Shop and moving everything to our domain and web site. This way, we can make a few sales, eliminate the Etsy fees and we will see more profit quicker.
Don’t get me wrong! Etsy was a great platform to springboard us out on our own. It may take some time before we get our feet wet here, but we can weather the storm a lot easier out on our own.
Enjoy our new site and we should have the inventory completed soon. We have more than 75% of our inventory on line and ready to go.
Thank you for hanging in there with us!