"DO YOU HAVE A WEBSITE?" THEY ASK
"How about ETSY?" They Ask
I’m taking the way-back machine to 2013, give or take a year.
At the time, I was elbow-deep in jewelry making: Full-on metalsmithing and bead artistry. My studio looked like a firefighter’s worst nightmare. I had a kiln, a torch, a jeweler’s saw, a professional Dremel, an anvil, and enough forming hammers and domes to make Thor jealous. Oh, and fire extinguishers. Multiple fire extinguishers.
All the jewelry I was producing needed to be marketed. My girlfriends didn’t want any more freebies, (OMG, who says ‘no’ to free jewelry?), and my husband was growing tired of supporting both his business and my “hobby”.
After several shoves from my “girls”, I applied to my first juried art show. I was accepted! The rest of that adventure? That’s a story for another blog.
Around the same time, I stumbled across a new online craft marketplace called ETSY. I spent some time, not enough time as it turns out, scrolling through the site and thought it might be a good secondary outlet for selling my jewelry.
Back then, ETSY had one major requirement: whatever you sold had to be handmade by the seller. (Requirements are substantially different now.) Listings came with a small fee, each sale came with a small fee. There were credit card transaction fees, PayPay fees, basically a fee for everything but the breath I took.
I cursed (literally) my way through setting up my online shop. I cursed through learning to photograph jewelry, I cursed my way through uploading, downloading, and pixel wrangling. It was a sh*t load to learn and master. I began with 25 listings. Each listing took no less than 30 minutes, no exaggeration. But. . .I did it. Yay me!
Finally, Desert Stones Jewelry was up and running on ETSY. I had an online presence. I had arrived! Alongside about 500 other shops just like mine.
ETSY is a truly global marketplace. There are bead artists from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and beyond. And their work is exquisite. And their shops were thriving. My shop? Not so much. No sales. Zero.
Here’s why, and I wish I’d done my homework better.
International artists were charging half of what I had to, even including shipping. They were selling $20 earrings that included international shipping, while I was pricing mine at $40.00 plus postage. Why? Because they were being paid in U.S. dollars, which, when converted to their local currency, netted them a lot more than if they sold domestically. Smart business for them, right? Me, not so much.
I continued on with my art shows, but only kept Desert Stones Jewelry open on ETSY for the balance of that year.
And just before I closed up shop, a miracle happened.
I sold one piece of art. Not a piece of jewelry, but canvas art. I’d been dabbling in assemblage on canvas and posted my favorite, just on a lark, for $75.00. It sold. To someone in Britain. I sold something! For $75!
Except. . .I hadn’t posted international shipping fees. Back then, if you didn’t enter a shipping cost, ETSY automatically listed the item as “Free Shipping.” That piece cost me nearly $50.00 to pack and ship. Ouch.
So, fun was had, lessons were learned, and my knowledge bank of online selling grew exponentially.
I still use ETSY. Not to sell, but to shop for beading components and handmade gifts. It’s very rough out there for small artists, and I want to support them whenever I can. Go to ETSY and scroll through. You’ll always find something that’s calling out to you. Maybe something hand-beaded by an artist thousands of miles away, at an exceptionally reasonable price. Go ahead, make their day!