I was sitting down this morning, drinking my coffee and trying to get my brain in gear for the day while watching the Today show. Â The feature was about Valentine’s Day and great personal gifts to give…great! Â Maybe some ideas! Â They went a few along with big name websites such as Snapfish and Pier One and then showed a personalized fishing lure telling this national audience that they could purchase at Etsy.com. Â Anyone else see a problem here? Â My heart just sank! You can check out the story here….
Etsy is a beast of a website but the Today show did not give the artists’ shop name or any way to really find him or her beyond Etsy front page. Â I did a fast search for “personalized fishing lure” in handmade and found 1,368 results from multiple artists. Â This hard working artist had the promotion of a lifetime to a national audience and there is NO WAY to find them.
This leads me to this question to all artists out there….who will they send your potential customers to? Â Do you have your own website, even if it is a blog that directs people to your shop on another venue to purchase? Â If someone finds one of your fabulous treasures and decides to feature it, will customers be able to find you?
There is nothing at all wrong with taking advantage of a site with built in traffic, a shop set up and ready to go and a community of artists; but when it comes to taking advantage of every opportunity to be found, be sure that your 15 minutes of fame are not wasted when a customer can not find you!
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What great timing! My wife and I have had a shop on Etsy for the last couple of years. Like you said, the built in traffic was great, but at some point it is easy to become white noise. For that reason, we have been building a website of our own over the last few weeks and just went LIVE TODAY! We are planning on making the announcement to our social media followers this afternoon! We are really excited about it and plan on shutting down our Etsy shop completely once all of our listings expire.
That’s exactly why I started my own website. If someone asks one of my customers where they got their necklace I want them to say Nature With You, not Etsy. I still sell on Etsy because it does have a lot of built in traffic but all my marketing efforts go to my website.