Friday, April 30, 2010

New Etsy Shop

Over the past few days, I've been setting up a Zen Cart for my website to make the process of taking orders easier. I needed to install the software on my website, of course, upgrade my PayPal account, sign up for some services on the USPS website for shipping and go through, configure the HELL out of Zen Cart and also setup the actual items to be sold and their properties. All in all, it really wasn't a bad experience doing all of this. I'm till not sure if my actual servers were setup with the actual permissions needed for the PayPal and USPS services to run properly.

All of this installing and configuring and setup done on my own website, using up my bandwidth, and I'm still stuck with a template from Zen Cart that does not NEARLY match my website AND I'm doing all the marketing myself! Then I remembered, Etsy! I've seen some people online promoting their Etsy shops and selling things on there, so I figured I'd check it out! Ok, so it's like $0.20 per item for a 4 month listing. Not horrible. And they take a 3.5% sales fee. Still, it's a site that people already go to in the first place? Compared to trying to draw the traffic to MY website? I'll pay the 3.5% commission, thank you.

Setting it up was pretty easy. I did it over night and even added my first item this morning! And, I'm not left wondering whether or not I've setup my server correctly, or if I got all the code adjusted properly, or anything like that. I don't have to worry about what switch I forgot to switch on or off or from test to whatever... It's all done. And it feels pretty damned cool if you ask me!

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