https://www.etsy.com/shop/MCAllisonArt?ref=dashboard-header
On Friday, July 24th, at the end of a two-week vacation, I decided to add a shop page to my website. I had a shop when I first started my blog in early 2023. I deleted that one, which created treacherous pitfalls in creating a new shop page. I use Bluehost, and I’m stuck with it until 2028 and probably past that, since getting a new host is basically starting over. I think Bluehost is better suited to businesses that need a lot of tech support. For a personal blog or website, if I started from scratch, I’d go with Squarespace or maybe a free hosting site. In this blog post, I’ll explain my website meltdown and then the inspiration to create an Etsy shop. An Etsy shop is probably a better option to sell stuff than a website shop, so I won!
I was trying to connect a shop to my website. I had to coordinate four different platforms: Bluehost, WordPress, WooCommerce, and Printful or Printify. It’s confusing, and the problem was a corrupt file I had in WooCommerce from the shop I deleted over 2 years ago. I looked up numerous troubleshooting techniques on Google. I had to delete and reactivate numerous plug-ins. One suggestion was to delete all the old media from WooCommerce and perform a full restart. That took a long time. At one point, I deleted my Jetpack plugin because I read that it could hinder what I was trying to do. It didn’t work, and I lost my stats. In the picture collage above is a screenshot of my stats from early 2023 to July 2026. I took it because I was warned the info could be lost.
I was trying to connect to Printful as my print-on-demand platform. That didn’t work, so I tried the competitor, Printify. That didn’t connect to my site either. At this point, I had spent all day working on this. I’m not sure why I started to think about Etsy, but I was able to connect to an Etsy Shop easily with Printify. Then I started playing around with the Etsy and Printify websites, and soon it was 11 pm. I forgot to eat dinner, so I ordered from Domino’s.
In almost two weeks, Etsy is my new obsession. I got 27 listings. For now, I’m only doing print-on-demand with T-Shirts, Prints, and Digital Prints. I’ve had two sales, which is good since it takes one to three months for shops to come up in Etsy searches. The more listings posted, the more likely it is to appear in Etsy searches. I do wonder if I can tweak more listings to make them stronger. I asked on social media if any of my contacts have Etsy pages. Maybe after a month or so, I’ll seek a professional to evaluate it quickly and give me feedback. I’m sure something like that is available online, but I do like figuring it out myself.
The problem with Print on Demand is that it’s too expensive. I read on multiple sites that people would rather pay a little extra for free shipping. It took me a while to figure out how to do that, only for shipping in the United States. With Printify, you pay for shipping; it’s part of the deal. Also, Etsy charges 20 cents per listing, plus 6.5 percent for sales, and if it’s bought through an off-site Etsy ad, they charge another 15 percent. That potentially could be 22 percent in fees. I calculated that the print-on-demand items need to be marked up at least 50 percent to make a profit. I recalculated my prices last night, and I decided on 30 bucks for a T-shirt, which may deter some people from buying. I’m hoping the shop catches on and people buy it anyway, since the artwork is so cool. If it goes months without sales, I may go with digital prints, since they’re much cheaper with no shipping costs. But I don’t know how popular digital prints are; one would need to figure out how to print them.
One friend pointed out to me that with original art, people want to own the artwork, and not necessarily prints or other products. The problem with this right now is packaging and shipping. I sold a few paintings to friends, and had a really hard time packaging them. I ended up cutting up boxes and using a lot of tape. If you sell on Etsy, you need to be on point with the packaging. At some point, I may get boxes to fit 8x10s and 16x20s so I can easily ship those sizes out, and use other appropriate packaging materials.
Etsy is better than a shop page because it could potentially be seen by more people.
Check out my Etsy!