Online Sales

I was finishing up my paperwork for the month and was shaking my head some. Now I am not talking about sales coming directly out of a shop to the customer. Online that involves shipping. My domestic sales this year are way down, like about 60% roughly. Haven't been this low actually since 2011. Now, my international sales are going just fine. Shipping is getting to be a pain in the butt, but the customer is paying for the added costs so that's fine with me. Those 3 locations are still ordering pretty much every quarter like clockwork. In fact they picked up enough to cover the sales I lost from a re-seller in Mississippi who turned out to be a ding a ling and was actually glad to see him go. So, I was wondering if anyone else is noticing this with online sales. Or, is it just me. I do bathe regularly so I know it ain't that.

My online sales have always been a little sporadic... I do most of my sales in person at my regular art and craft show that's part of the farmer's market in downtown Knoxville. The market only runs from May to December so that means I have a 5 month "off period" where I hope to get a few on line sales. I do get lots of views on my ETSY site, sometimes as many as 200 in one day, though that's also rare... usually in the 20-50 range and from all over the world. International sales are very sparse. I've shut my personal website down and just rely on the ETSY site now... in the beginning and before the ETSY store, my website did okay, paid for itself every year in sales, then a couple of years back seemed to have dried up and was costing me more than I was making, so shut it down, but kept the domain name.

Chuck out of curiosity how much was the website costing?

You can still get hosting for plain (no e-commerce) sites in the $10 range so I'm wondering if it would be worth having a simple site up that just skinned your Etsy store plus had some of the blah blah marketing that's hard to get into Etsy. Of course there's the maintenance overhead so...