This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today we've got a short and sweet question from a listener. They have been selling on Etsy and they want to make the switch to a Shopify store. Shopify has a ton of additional flexibility, so many different features. You can do anything with Shopify in terms of e-commerce. In fact, Shopify is, I believe, a billion dollar company that has helped so many people.
Of course, Etsy has helped a lot of people as well. It's just a little bit different. It's a different selling platform. So for this person who wants to make a transition, what's the best way to do it? Maybe not just the best way, but what is important to do along the way?
And why would you want to make such a transition in the first place? Well, I just talked about all the amazing features that Shopify has, but also Etsy has some pretty good features as well and can be a little bit easier and more beginner-friendly, but I'll talk about that. Let's hear the detailed question from Elsa and my answer. All that is coming right up in this short action-packed episode. [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Elsa from Seattle, and I've been listening to the show since I first read "Side Hustle" a couple of years ago.
I've been selling on Etsy for a while, but mostly I've been listing on Etsy. I make a few sales here and there. It's just not what I'd like it to be. I'm in the process of setting up a Shopify store, which seems fairly complicated even though they have lots of tutorials. There are also lots of apps you can use with Shopify, a bunch of options and features to choose from, and I tend to get decision fatigue from these things, which might be why I've stuck with Etsy.
Do you have any tips for making the transition? Thanks for any guidance you can give me. [Music]
Well, having your own website, which is what you have when you have a Shopify site, as opposed to just a directory page on Etsy.com, your own website has every advantage but one. You don't pay fees. You have more direct contact with customers.
You can fully customize it. So what's not to love? And by the way, when I say you don't pay fees, I mean, you don't pay fees for your listings. You are still paying something to Shopify. That's how they make their money.
But what is not to love? What's the one advantage it doesn't have? The one advantage in this situation is built-in traffic. That's what Etsy provides. Etsy makes it easy to publish your listings to a global marketplace of buyers.
So when you're switching to your own website, whether it's on Shopify or anything else, that is a pretty big limitation. So a lot of people will make the transition, open a web shop of their own, but also keep their Etsy shop open because that's where customers are coming from. So ultimately you can kind of do a two-way solution. If you're gonna just switch completely, make sure you have a source of traffic, make sure you know like where customers are gonna come from or have a plan for that because it might be pretty quiet otherwise, at least for awhile. Now, as for moving over to Shopify, I mean, they have so many customers.
They have been through this process. They are also beginner-friendly, but it is true that it is feature-rich. There's a lot you can do. So I would recommend you spend a couple of hours like watching some videos, playing with the app to learn it. You're not trying to become a coder, not at all.
It's all plug and play, drag and drop. It's visual, but you just wanna be able to run your own shop. You don't wanna be so dependent on somebody else that you can't make simple changes. So a little knowledge goes a long way. I would recommend maybe spending the better part of a weekend or to break it up over a couple of weekday evenings to making the switch just so you have the best possible new Shopify site.
And that's exciting. It's kind of fun to have a new website. I always enjoy that process. Maybe once a year or kind of depends on what I'm doing in my world, but whenever I have a new site, it's always like, oh, this is the cool shiny new site. Let me spend more time on this than everything else that I've built for the past 20 years.
But that's another problem. We might address that another time. Listeners, thank you for being out there. How do you transition from Etsy to Shopify? That was today's topic.
We have many, many other topics covered in the archives, 3,300 plus episodes, in fact, all completely free, available for streaming or download on the website. And of course, new episodes drop every day, wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, Apple Music, your preference, anywhere at all, always free. That's it for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School.
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- From the Onward Project.
