Etsy & eBay & eCommerce

I’ve gotten lots of questions in the comments on yesterday’s post, so I will try to answer them today.

What Happened in 2016

If you don’t want the techy stuff. just skip to the section on eBay stores.

I had used one host provider since the beginning of this blog and had been very happy. Then they got sold and consolidated support. This caused several things to break:

• You could no longer escalate support issues to competent people.
• The only support people you could reach had the internet knowledge of 13-year-olds.
• They kept messing around with my blog without permission & bringing it down.

Every time the blog went down I had to call support, kick & scream, and eventually get something they “said” would fix it. And down it would come again. Since I value having the blog up for you guys, this was unacceptable.

The Solution – Sort of

I moved everything to other providers. This blog is on WPEngine, one of the best host providers in the world. But they are expensive. Everything else is on Siteground, another excellent provider. Through them I was able to move my sites BUT. . .

Unknown to me and without my permission my whole eCommerce site, Napa Needlepoint, was hosted on a third party that owned the software I was using and licensed it to my host provider.

As a result nothing of that got moved — I lost it all.

There are good solutions to create eCommerce sites on your own. But realistically they require more time and energy than I have right now. So I’m looking at sites where someone else creates and maintains the infrastructure.

eBay Stores

I’m a huge fan of eBay as a buyer, but as a seller they aren’t for me. That’s because I would need to have an eBay store. If you set up a store you are charged a certain amount every month just to have the store. Think of it as “rent.”

Then you pay a seller’s fee each time you sell something.

The rent is high enough that I would need to have many more items than I do to justify it.

Amazon

I sell my printed books on Amazon and am looking at ways to increase what ebooks are there. But they are set up for ebooks to be on Kindles. As someone who reads ten books per month on my Kindle I know formatting can be a problem for graphic heavy items. Until I can solve that problem, Amazon isn’t the solution.

Etsy

That leaves me with Etsy. I do use it as a buyer but I find it’s search capabilities to be poor. But going directly to a store works much better and I am buying more on Etsy these days.

I have tried doing an Etsy store a couple of times & it didn’t work well. That could be because I was relying on Etsy to help people find me. That experience is the main reason I’ve avoided it.

In terms of fees Etsy charges a listing fee per item. Once until it sells. Then, like eBay, they charge a transaction fee.

The listing fees are such that I would need to list 75+ items on eBay each month to spend that much on Etsy. I’m too small for that.

Conclusions

There you have it, what happened and what I am considering. I’m really valuing your opinions and I want to make it easy for you to buy. Watch for developments next week.