Migration from Etsy To Shopify
So you have finally decided you're ready to move over to your site and quit at sea. read this article, where I'll share my recommended steps to make the transition as easy and smooth as possible for you. If you haven't yet read my previous article in this Etsy series, make sure you do quit. Etsy would not be an easy or simple decision, especially if you made most of your sales and income. From there, I have another article that walks you through the questions you should ask yourself to find out. If you're ready to leave Etsy, make sure you at least read that one before you read this. Hi, my name is Mei, and I help makers, artists, and designers make a consistent income selling their handmade products online. I have an Etsy shop, and I have my site, and my site makes me more than 95% of my sales. My general philosophy for most people is not to put all your focus on your Etsy shop but to put energy instead in your site. Yes, it is a lot harder to get started and get momentum with your site. Still, it is the better, longer-term solution for those of you who see your business as a long-term career almost and not just a hobby business, especially if you're looking at your business to be a full-time income at some point, or even if you're already there.
Still, 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 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 to your site. This is what I do with my jewelry business. I never gave Etsy more focus than my site. And the nice thing for me is Etsy 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. And you wouldn't have made that sale otherwise. So why not? Right. Okay, so now I will move off my soapbox and let us talk through the steps. No, because I can only cover so much in this article. 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 an article showing you exactly how to do each of these things. So the first step is to 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 shop's settings. These steps will 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 not my business or income model, but did you know that I didn't start 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, and I have total 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 tagging your products and your Instagram posts or doing Bible pins on Pinterest. I believe that Shopify is the best solution for most people, so 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, and 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 use the free minimal theme from Shopify as an official theme store. Minimal and debut are both free. Awesome themes that I recommend to most people. If you have the budget to spare and want something fancier, although I would argue that fancier doesn't mean more effective or more sales, 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, 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 your theme from.
If you have any questions about your theme, they're not exactly cheap either. They're like to $400 for a theme, and not all themes are created equal. I was helping out a salady student with her website because she wanted to do paid ads, but her site wasn't ready for it yet because it was converting at a low percentage, and it turns out she was using a paid team from one of these third-party sites. The theme you choose directly correlates 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 take the time to shop for a theme that other people prove 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, match your brand's colors, upload your logo in a change your fonts, etc. You're also 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 variants, 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 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 could keep your product descriptions more or less the same as Google doesn't penalize you for duplicate content between your site and your Etsy shop. However, I 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. You are now playing the Google SEO game when you're on your site, so you have to make adjustments. Going from Etsy SEO to Google SEO is an example of my waffle necklace on Etsy, waffle necklace, parks and recreation, Amy Poehler. Leslie Knope gift for a sister graduation gift for best friend.
Send it a foodie gift. We do this on Etsy to rank our products higher. An Etsy search, right when you're on your website. Please don't do this on my website. This is the title of my waffle necklace, and I sent it a 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. Suppose 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. In that case, 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 a while 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 site. When you're starting your 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, many subconscious purchasing triggers cause people to buy one thing but not the other. 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 same things at the same prices. Shop a has lots of positive customer feedback, and that yellow five-star icon rating shop also has press mentions they've put around their sites. So you know, they've been on magazines and blogs and so on. We look at shop B which doesn't have any customer feedback on their site and no press mentions; which would you buy from a shop 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 will copy and paste your Etsy reviews into a spreadsheet and import them 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. You should get one if you don't already have a custom branded domain email address. 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. 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 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. Still, now that you're on your site, you want to be presentable and professional. 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. It also took a week to move over. There will 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 in your Etsy shop. Maybe it's on your business cards or packaging or 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. Don't worry about old social media posts. It is not worth the time to edit all your posts to point to the new website because it's also likely that no one sees those old posts anymore. And if you've been featured anywhere online on a website or a blog, you can also email them to update 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 setting 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 the cart, use your website and make a 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, I recommend at least an ongoing budget of $300 a month. Facebook ads are super powerful as well. Paid ads almost completely power our new shop, and we can easily spend $1 and make $4 back. So it's worth looking into and investing in learning to do it right.
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