A One-Woman Marketing Department

Whether you are someone who is just getting started in the world of online sales or you are a seasoned veteran making many sales a week, you may feel yourself getting pulled in different directions for what you should be doing for your business. It can be a little confusing, especially if you consider yourself more of a crafter / maker than an online salesman. Etsy wants you to do their business on their marketplace, but companies like Shopify want you to migrate your shop over there and host a stand-alone site. They've been so successful at getting new sellers, that now Etsy even offers "Pattern", they're own version of allowing you to have a stand-alone shop. But all you want to do is grow your business and make sales, so what's the best way to accomplish that? Well I'm sorry to say that there's no one answer that fits every situation. You'll have to evaluate your business and goals for yourself, but what I am going to do for you is to...

Shopify provides a great basic framework for creating an e-commerce store. They provide great customer support and an easy to use framework at a good value. But after opening up shop, you may realize that the basic Shopify framework doesn't support all the features you want it to right out of the gate. And Shopify never intends to. In all honesty, that would probably make the framework too complicated and bulky for their average user anyway. So, Shopify makes up for this by having an open app marketplace for add-ons and features for very basic things to solving much more complicated problems. Many of these apps have one-time charges or monthly fees that tack on to your Shopify bill, and it's up to you to decide if it's worth the money for that feature. I, myself, am more of a DIY-er and learned enough of Shopify's liquid code (it helped that I already had intermediate HTML/CSS knowledge) in order to make a lot of customizations to my code myself in order to limit ...