I’ve been running my online shop on eBay for a little while now. The good thing about eBay is that you have a lot of traffic. If you get the price, the description and the product right, people will find it and hopefully buy it.

The eBay auction side of things really helps to drive sales, and also helps to guide people into your shop. Also with a shop you can lay things out reasonably well with quite limited skills. You can also try to get people to add your shop as a favourite or sign up to your newsletter. At least you can let people know what’s new in your shop – that’s if you can get them to sign up!

eBay is great in that you get all the things you need to set up an online shop, all the payment side, all the reminders and they act as a ‘big brother’ to sort of disputes.

Feedback is good to help enhance your reputation as an online seller. 100% good feedback not only looks good, but also lets your customers know that your products are good and the delivery times and prices are good. The problem is that the feedback is more on the side of the buyer rather than the seller. If you had a poor customer (which if you’re on eBay, you will have from time to time) you can never give constructive feedback. Where as customers can give positive, neutral or negative feedback.

Aside from all these good things about eBay, there is a big elephant in the room. As a small seller it actually costs a lot. I find a large portion of any profit I make, is fed back to eBay, as shop costs, listing costs, and selling costs.

So, I’ve been investigating options.

This is where Etsy comes in. As I sell mainly vintage or handmade, Etsy actually fits the bill quite nicely for me.

I set up a new shop on Etsy really easily and I’ve listed some of my more premium stock. There’s no charges for an Etsy shop, unlike eBay. Also the listing costs seem cheaper, but I need to look at the financials on this over a couple of months. The listings last for longer too – 4 months as opposed to the eBay length of up to 30 days before renewal.

I quite like the ‘feel’ of Etsy. It’s more like a community and you can start to build up circles.

It’s early days, but I haven’t sold anything on Etsy yet. I have had a few people add some items or my shop as favourites. During the couple of weeks I’ve had an Etsy shop, I have been selling items on eBay, thought mainly from my auctions. But, like I said, the auctions do drive more sales.

Here are the two shops:
eBay – Quirky Purple eBay Online Shop
Etsy – Quirky Purple Etsy Online Shop

I’m going to try both out, side by side, for a couple of months to see which works best for me.

Has anyone else had experience of switching between these two? Which worked best for you an why?