You know what we like to talk about here at Everything Etsy. We could go on forever and ever about the incredible potential Etsy.com represents for your future. And we believe it! We actually live it and are right there with you building our own Etsy shops every day.
But that’s not all we do. And if you’ve found success on Etsy by methodically and relentlessly applying everything you’ve learned about selling online, then maybe it’s not all you want to do either. Maybe you’re ready to reach for the next level.
BigCommerce is highly customizable, allowing for a great looking shop!
Building and Running Your Own Online eCommerce Site
Your long term goal is to build a large enough customer base and product selection so that you can provide a real full-time income. You want to be a true-life “Quit Your Day Job” success story. Having your own store on your own URL is a great ingredient in that mix.
I honestly can’t see any reason you would ever want to stop selling on Etsy. The bigger you get on Etsy, the more sales you have, the easier it becomes to get more. There is no reason to stop a good thing.
Building your own eCommerce site is a way to increase your income and sales potential without increasing your workload just as much. A few advantages to your own site:
- No need to relist and no listing fees
- Express your style with a custom design
- Remove the competition from your buyers view – only your items
- Offer directly downloadable items
- Add multiple items to your stock at once
- Integrate with email marketing software
- Add links to product information or outside websites
- Add videos about your products directly in the listing
- Enjoy integrated statistics and dashboard controls
- Connect your online store directly with your blog seamlessly
- Build long term SEO value to your own domain, where you can benefit most
- Create a site that is more easily sale-able if you decide to get-out
- Make your products more searchable, more sortable
- Allow customers to review your items and rate them individually
- Allow customers to build and maintain wish-lists
- Set-up various types of shipping by weight, region, price, etc.
- Quickly see what your biggest sellers are
- Quickly see who your best customers are
- Fully integrate with Google Analytics to track conversions and actual sales
Well, I guess it’s more than just a few advantages! If you’ve got the traffic, selling on your own site has lots of great features.
Incredible Design Flexibility
I’ve taken advantage of all of these at my own site, KimberlyLayton.com
Visitors to KimberlyLayton.com arrive first at this landing page on my WordPress site
The way I’ve set it up, you first arrive at a WordPress site which is a sort of a landing page. From there you can go to my blog, one of the static pages on the WordPress site, or to my BigCommerce shop, which is located at shop.kimberlylayton.com
This is my actual shop. BigCommerce is highly customizable, allowing for a great looking shop!
As you can see, the shop and the WordPress site are barely distinguishable visually. That’s thanks to the easy customization of BigCommerce, which is considered by many professionals to be the most customizable of the shopping cart platforms.
Awesome Dashboard and Controls
The control panel of my BigCommerce shop is a breath of fresh air! Everything is so easy to use and understand. I can totally handle most of it myself without calling to the next room for my tech support guy! Yay!
The Products Dashboard is soooo easy to use!
Integrated Marketing keeps things organized.
We looked at all of the major players before opening up my BigCommerce shop. We did a trial of Volusion, the other leader in the market, and when we looked at the overall options and pricing BigCommerce was the clear winner.
I haven’t covered anywhere near all that makes this my recommendation for you when you’re ready to start your own site. It would be a whole book! The best way to find out for yourself is to just go do a free trial and see what I mean first-hand.
If you have any questions about BigCommerce, please share them in the comments and we’ll try to answer if we can.
Disclosure: We loved BigCommerce so much that we made our company, Crazy Tree Media, an authorized BigCommerce reseller and designer. We’re also a BigCommerce partner and we get commissions when we sell a new BigCommerce account. But none of that was the case before we selected BigCommerce and what we found as actual BigCommerce customers was so great that we looked to get more involved. Try it and you’ll see!”
I do not have anything for sale in etsy right now and it is there as wizard of paws, but I never seem to do that great but hear a lot of good that I am creative. Their listings are not too fair at time and some get that attention over and over when searching sites so I am on hold but would love my very own site but things are in the air for now and fixing to start Chemo and do not know if I could keep up and what does all this entail and how hard is word press?
Carol Hansen
Hey Kimberly,
Do you know if there is an easy way to get my products from Etsy to BigCommerce? Is there a feature like a product feed or a way to transfer them all in a CSV file?
Thanks,
Patton Gleason
Hi Patton,
If you go to the your Shop settings -> Options page, you can click on the “Download Data” tab to download a CSV file that represents your current Etsy store. You can take that file and import it to your BigCommerce store following these instructions: https://support.bigcommerce.com/articles/Public/Importing-Product-SKUs
I hope this helps. Good luck.
I have a medium sized Etsy store for 3-4 years, and also a pattern site. They both do well. I am interested in making the pattern site (my url) migrated over to a new Big Commerce site. What is the best way to migrate? and does BC have a way to purchase shipping labels. I typically ship 10-20 a day and it has to be as simple as Etsy to work for me.