Many up-and-coming artists, small business owners, and crafters are often at the mercy of big online retailer: Etsy. In the past, Etsy was the ideal platform for artists just starting out in their business, but it’s since grown into a mainstream mongrel, making it difficult for individuals to market their business and get enough traffic in their store, to make paying those growing monthly fees worthwhile.
So here are some Etsy alternatives to selling your stuff!
The beauty of StoreNVY that Etsy doesn’t have is that its void of fees: unless you want to upgrade to a monthly subscription. This upgrade allows you to use features like applying discount codes and having a more in-depth insight into the visits on your store. However, without the upgrade, you get a free service that allows you to sell your art.
When a customer checks out in StoreNVY, additional fees and taxes are applied to their purchase. This comes out of THEIR pocket, NOT yours. The $30 price tag you placed on a listing, plus the $10 shipping you designated (oh yeah, you get to set up shipping for weight classes and shipment destinations), is all yours. The additional fees and taxes are StoreNVY’s cut. If the customer checks out using PayPal or Swipe, there are fees those services take out of your profits, but that’s separate and minimal.
Thus far, I’ve also seen that without the upgrade, I get virtually unlimited product listings, and get to easily organize them by category (i.e. stickers, t-shirts, prints, etc.), and customize the store to a variety of colors and fonts.
BigCartel has been aimed at up-and-coming artists as an Etsy alternative for a long time. Like StoreNVY, BigCartel offers a free store plan option, but you’re limited to 5 items. They have plans set up that allow you to pay for the number of features you’d want: $10 a month plans allow for 25 product listings, storefront customization and you’re own domain URL.
BigCartel does offer unique customization to the store layouts and provides a dashboard of statistics like monthly visitors, orders and revenue. They do offer time-sensitive discounts and offer payment options through PayPal and Stripe. Much like StoreNVY, you’re on your own as far as marketing your store goes, unless you become a featured artist like the one shown below.
Another Etsy alternative is Shopify, which is similar to others on this list in that it allows artists and small business owners to set up shop for free, and customize their store with a variety of beautiful looking layouts to give their store a professional look.
Shopify offers a very full dashboard that allows for much control and task management for the store owner from processing orders and managing inventory. There is again the option to activate discounts for customers.
Shopify also offers many in-store apps that are useful to you the store owner, and to your customer that can really enhance the experience, one has in your store from marketing to sales, to social media to customer service and so on. Shopify also has a much more user-friendly interface that allows you to easily search the item or app you need.
This is another site that offers payment plans and they make it easy to calculate what you can afford based on how much revenue you’ll be making. They offer 4 different plans ranging from $9/month to $299 a month. Each plan includes unlimited product listings, file storage, shipping label discounts, and packaging, along with the additional features the plan has.
Wix is a website builder than can easily just be used as a portfolio site to advertise who you are and what you do. It can be attached to the bio in your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on, directing customers or fans to explore your site and get to know you.
However, upgrading to a business plan on Wix allows for transactions to be made, and they offer a variety of payment plan options. The Business Basic plan, being their cheapest one is $23 a month and the features it offers are unlimited bandwidth, 20GB storage, removing Wix ads, google analytics and a free domain for 1 year, plus more.
However for $27 a month if you get Business Unlimited you get all those features but with 35GB of storage. These plans are likely most ideal for newer artists. But these plans are strictly within the Business & eCommerce section of the upgrade, which is in addition to the fully customized website you’ve already created, which if you don’t pay for you are hosting Wix ads and a Wix URL.
While eBay may seem old-school and very different from the other sites on this list, I have seen artists over the years sell their art and creations through eBay. Just like how eBay works you set up a listing or an auction for people to bid on. This could be quite beneficial to artists just starting out who don’t have a lot of money, or even time to build and customize a site. eBay listings can easily be advertised on other social media, and we know this site is a popular one that brings in a lot of foot traffic.
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