So you have finally decided you're ready to move over to your own site and quit
at sea.
Watch this video where I'll share with you my recommended steps to make the
transition as easy and smooth as possible for you.
If you haven't yet watched my previous videos in this Etsy series,
make sure you do quitting. Etsy is not an easy or simple decision,
especially if you made most of your sales and income. From there,
I have another video that walks you through the questions you should ask
yourself to find out. If you're really ready to leave Etsy,
make sure you at least watched that one before you watch this.
Hi, my name is Mei and I help makers, artists,
and designers and make a consistent income selling their handmade products
online.
I have an Etsy shop and I have my own site and my own site makes me more than
95% of my sales.
My general philosophy for most people is to not put all your focus on your Etsy
shop, but to put energy instead in your own site. Yes,
it is a lot harder to get started and to get momentum with your own site,
but it is the better,
longer term solution for those of you who see your business as being a longterm
career almost and not just a hobby business and especially if you're looking at
your business to being a full time income at some point,
or even if you're already there,
but you're sick of the out of control rollercoaster that is Etsy,
then it's time to move out.
This is very important,
but as I talk about the steps you need to take to transition away from Etsy,
I want to stress that I am by no means saying to close down your Etsy shop,
you have spent months,
if not years and time and effort and energy to build out your shop.
That's valuable and I personally don't think it's a good idea to waste them.
Right?
So keep it up and nearly shift your focus and energy from Etsy over to your own
site. This is what I do with my jewelry business.
I never ever gave Etsy more focus than my own site.
And the nice thing for me is Etsy just generates semi passive income for me in
the sense that I don't have to do active marketing to my Etsy shop.
It just sits there and I get multiple sales every week without doing anything.
If your shop has the potential to do that, why would you close it down?
Completely? A sale is a sale is a sale, right?
And you wouldn't have made that sale otherwise. So why not? Right.
Okay,
so now I'm going to move off my soap box and let us talk through the steps.
No, because I can only cover so much in this video.
This is a brief overview of the steps.
I'm not going to deep dive into any of them too much because I think you can
figure it out yourself.
And each of these steps would take like a half hour to an hour of a video
showing you exactly how do each of these things.
So the first step is remember you're going to keep your Etsy shop running in the
background and concurrently you're going to sign up for your own Shopify site,
pick out a theme and configure your shops settings.
These steps are going to be specific to Shopify and some of you think I'm
getting paid to talk about Shopify, but I am not.
I don't make any money affiliating any products.
That's just not my business or income model,
but did you know that I didn't start out using Shopify from the get go?
I use Presta shop WordPress. I've worked on clients' sites.
We use Squarespace and Wix.
I have done extensive research and trial and error myself,
testing all the different solutions out and I have a comprehensive pros and cons
list of each platform that I give to my A Sale a Day students. Long story short,
I don't recommend Shopify just for no reason.
They are the leading eCommerce platform by far and nothing can come close to it.
Shopify has all the integrations and they're always first to get cool new
features like being able to tag your products and your Instagram posts or doing
Bible pins on Pinterest.
I just believe that Shopify is the best solution for most people and that is why
I recommend them all the time. It's not because I get a kickback. Okay guys,
well, what do you take me for now when it comes to picking a Shopify theme,
go with something simple and proven. You can find themes directly on Shopify.
Some are free, some are paid.
I have a new shop we just launched a few months ago that's already making over
$20,000 in sales and we just use the free minimal theme from Shopify as official
theme store. Minimal and debut are both free.
Awesome themes that I recommend to most people.
If you do have the budget to spare and you want something fancier,
although I would argue that fancier doesn't mean more effective or more sales,
so be careful where you spend your money.
There are third party sites you can Google for it.
To find Shopify themes like theme forest.
Out of the sandbox and pixel union.
If you get themes from these sites,
just know that they're not officially approved by Shopify,
so you can't get theme related support through Shopify,
but you'll have to ask the specific shops that you bought the your theme from.
If you have any questions about your theme, they're not exactly cheap either.
They're like one to $400 for a theme and not all themes are created equal.
I was actually just helping out in a salady student with her website because
she's wanting to do paid ads,
but her site wasn't ready for it yet because it was converting at a very low
percentage and it turns out she was using a paid team from one of these third
party sites.
The theme you choose has a direct correlation with your conversion rate,
which is tied to how many sales you get from your traffic.
The higher your conversion rate, the more sales you get.
So just take the time to shop for a theme that's proven by other people to have
a good conversion rate. If you're not sure,
I think the best starting point is the free minimal or debut themes from
Shopify. When you're on Shopify, it is super easy to edit your theme,
to match your brand's colors, upload your logo in a change your fonts and so on.
You're also going to want to go through all the pages in your settings one by
one to fill in the blanks or set things up in there. Step two,
you're going to upload your products and the good news is since you didn't close
down your Etsy shop,
you have all your product listings from there that you can export out of Etsy
and import into your Shopify store.
Now you can do this manually and copy and paste everything over or you can hire
someone to do it for you on Upwork.
The last time I did something like that for about 50 or so products with
somewhat complicated variances and then it took about a day to get done and the
cost was under a hundred dollars to me that's worth it because I know I would
have taken weeks to get around to doing it. Alternatively,
there are also now apps you can use to import your Etsy products.
I haven't tried this one out myself,
but it has good reviews and it seems to work well.
It's an app in the Shopify store called Easy Import Etsy migration.
It isn't free,
but it is relatively affordable at 10 cents per important listing,
so if you have a hundred listings,
it'll cost just $10 and I think $10 is a pretty darn good trade for the days you
would spend doing this. If you did it yourself manually,
you can keep your product descriptions more or less the same as Google doesn't
penalize you for duplicate content between your own site and your Etsy shop.
However,
I do recommend you review your product titles because most Etsy product listings
I've seen tend to be keyword stuffed and don't make much sense to a human
reading it. When you're on your own site,
you are now playing the Google SEO game, so you have to make adjustments.
Going from Etsy SEO to Google SEO like this is an example of my waffle necklace
on Etsy, waffle necklace, parks and recreation, Amy Poehler.
Leslie Knope gift for sister graduation gift for best friend.
Send it foodie gift. We do this on Etsy to rank our products higher.
An Etsy search, right when you're on your own website.
Don't do this on my own website. This is the title of my waffle necklace,
sent it butter and maple syrup, waffle necklace.
Simple and easy for a human to understand, right?
Google favors user experience and accessibility above all else.
So the best thing you can do for Google search is to give your customers an
amazing experience when they come to your site.
That's when Google will treat you well.
If you did that the other way and tried to appeal first to Google and just
keyword stuff,
your product listings and you weren't giving much thought to the user
experience,
humans are not going to have a positive experience going through your site and
as a result, you're not going to get on Google's good side. Make sense?
Step three.
If you've been on Etsy for awhile and you've made sales and gotten reviews and
ratings, this is especially important for you to do.
You're going to import your product reviews from Etsy over to your own site.
When you're starting your own standalone shop,
you're going to want to give it every best chance to succeed. Right?
And when it comes to shopping online these days,
there are many subconscious purchasing triggers that cause people to buy one
thing but not the other.
Some of those subconscious purchasing triggers are things like social proof,
credibility, urgency, authority.
These are different ways to persuade a person to buy from.
You take two exact shops, for example,
selling the exact same things at the same prices.
Shop a has lots of positive customer feedback and that yellow five-star icon
rating shop a also has press mentions they've put around their sites.
So you know, they've been on magazines and blogs and so on.
Now we look at shop B who doesn't have any customer feedback on their site and
no press mentions,
which would you buy from shop a right?
It's no surprise that people use these factors to help them have confidence and
trust buying from you. And if anything,
it doesn't hurt your business and it can only help it.
So take the time to do this.
You're going to copy and paste your Etsy reviews into a spreadsheet and then
import it into Shopify.
You're probably going to need to use an app to get this done,
and that's the product reviews app that should come built in for free with your
Shopify subscription. You'll need to download the template spreadsheet.
The app will give you step four.
If you don't already have a custom branded domain email address,
then you should definitely get one.
So if you've been using something like tiny hands jewelry@gmail.com you'll want
to upgrade that to info or hello@tinyhandsonline.com this is a service with a
monthly fee and there used to be a free but complicated way to do this,
but that doesn't exist anymore,
so it is about $6 a month to get an email like that with an inbox at Google,
just school, Google business email, and you'll find a steps for signing up.
The reason you want something like this is most likely you don't already have
one because if you've just talked to all your customers,
by Etsy messages in combos. You didn't need to have a branded email address,
but now that you're on your own site,
you do want to be presentable and professional and the most common way to
communicate with customers or potential customers will be via email and having a
business email address is an easy way to communicate that you're legit. Again,
it goes back to giving your customers confidence and trust that they can buy
from you now, setting all that stuff up, including your Shopify store,
your new theme, configuring the settings, uploading your product listings.
That should take you a week or so to do my new Shopify store,
it took me a week and one of my students I'm helping with her transition from
Squarespace to Shopify.
Also took a week to move over there is going to be a learning curve,
so be patient with yourself and the process in step five when your shop is ready
for the public,
it's time to start redirecting your traffic from your Etsy shop to your new
site.
This means if you've got any links on your social media bios pointing to your
Etsy shop,
you'll want to change those links to send people to your new shop instead.
Or if you've got a domain name that was redirecting people to your Etsy shop,
you want to go into your domain registrar and remove that redirect because you
most likely want to connect that domain with your new Shopify site.
So think about all the places you might have listed your Etsy shop.
Maybe it's on your business cards or packaging or on your craft show booth
banner or in your email autoresponders or your email list or your email
signature.
You will eventually want to get those things all changed out and updated.
Having said that, don't worry about old social media posts.
It is not worth the time to go through editing all your posts to point to the
new website because it's also likely no one is seeing those old posts anymore.
And if you've been featured anywhere online on a website or a blog,
you can totally also email them to update them, your links,
not everyone will update it for you,
but some of them will and every point of traffic counts. Step six,
it's time to start sending traffic to your new website.
Now obviously that in itself is not something I can teach you in depth in 10
minutes as traffic and marketing will now become the lifeblood of your business
and it takes time to learn how to do it and it's something that you'll be
spending most of your time on from now on. But in a nutshell,
you will want to create a system for outreach.
That means pitching your products to magazines, blogs, influencers,
TV shows and so on,
and set up your email autoresponders and signup forms on your website.
Keep up your social media posting and make sure your site is search engine
optimized and conversion rate optimized.
Conversion rate optimization means your site is optimized for sales.
So walk through your site as if you're a customer and click on links, images,
add stuff to cart,
use your website and make note of any improvements or changes you should make to
the experience your site's giving you. And if you have the budget for it,
and I recommend at least an ongoing budget of $300 a month.
Facebook ads is super powerful as well.
Our new shop is almost completely powered by paid ads and we can easily spend $1
and make $4 back.
So it's worth looking into and investing in learning to do it right.
My A Sale a Day course does teach you how to do that.
If you want to learn more about how to get more traffic and convert that traffic
into sales.
Watch my free workshop linked in the description where I talk in more detail
about that.