I'm getting together my designs and what not to make clothing and lingerie. I had been planning in opening shop on Etsy, but I've read alot negative changes. Is there another platform I could use?
if you have a significant following, i would just launch your own website and then work on expanding your following and driving more people to it. unless you have a very specific niche (which, it’s hard to tell from this ask–clothing and lingerie are both extremely competitive, even if you’re serving an underrepresented market) you’re going to have trouble standing out in organic search results period, and trying to wrestle with etsy’s SEO is kind of tough–i recommend doing research on this before launching if you can.
people make fun of folks on etsy and ebay with titles like “pink crop top tshirt cropped tee pastel cute summer (etc…)” but the reason folks do that is they’re trying desperately to get their shit noticed in a sea of folks who have the following or $ to pay for better advertising anyway who are spending it on etsys’ promoted listings, or who are just getting featured by etsy randomly and raking in views, which then pushes them further to the top.
if you don’t have a following, you should definitely be working towards getting one. it’s a lot easier to build a brand if you’re being active on social media and trying to get people excited about what you’re doing. but if you’re small, and just starting out, etsy isn’t a terrible choice.
i know back in the day storenvy was also a good option for folks, but i have no idea how active they are now. the whole 10% on each marketplace sale PLUS what you have to pay in fees to stripe or paypal (and what you’ll eventually have to pay in taxes as an entrepreneur) seemed like a steep cut for me since my whole thing is keeping my prices as affordable as possible for the customer, and i left the platform shortly after that.
if you have an audience you can drive to it, tictail is free and a good starter store option that has a really nice clean interface and the ability to add apps and stuff to make certain things easier on you that are (or were, when i was on it) as cheap as like $1 a month, which is kind of a big deal. the only downside is that their marketplace isn’t extremely active, so you’ll have to work to push people to it rather than them just finding it organically most of the time.
shopify is also just like, my favorite and my go-to, it’s what i use today. there’s a reason big brands like colourpop, kylie cosmetics, thinx, penguin books, redbull, tesla, and skinnydip all use shopify–it works and it’s pretty much infinitely customizable, on top of being incredibly professional looking. but you’re also going to have to be driving 100% of your traffic, as shopify has no marketplace.
i recently sat down and did some math with my own sales calculating the percentage of sales that was actually being taken from each platform, which ends up varying wildly month to month based on a lot of different factors, but once you get into around $1000+ a month in sales you start saving money by using shopify. etsy has some hidden fees that really stack up when you’re actively moving products and having to renew listings constantly. you can account for those things in your item price of course, but when you’re in a competitive market where a $5 bump makes a significant difference to a customer you can start really losing out on sales.
so…it really depends on a lot of different factors for whether launching on etsy is a good choice or not, financially. i can tell you in terms of risk, any marketplace (including etsy) is a lot less of a time commitment and initial investment than shopify is. you can launch like a 10 item collection for $2.50 and then don’t have to pay anything else unless you have to renew a listing or the item is sold. all you’d need before hand is good pictures and to set up the listings which might take you like a week for taking photos and writing your listings but then you’re pretty much good to go. with shopify, you’re going to initially have to spend at least $29, and then setting up your shop isn’t difficult, but since you have so much more freedom and things you can do it’s a bigger time commitment. there are way more choices to be made, though you could still get something barebones up i’m sure, if for some reason you wanted that.
there’s a lot more i could say on the subject, but a lot of the decision making that you’ll need to do is going to be specific to the size of your business and your eventual goals with it. there’s also no harm with trying out these services and being on multiple platforms–i’ve always done that and it’s served me well in the past in helping me find what works best for me.
