If you sell on the Etsy marketplace and don’t already have your own website, then Etsy Pattern may be the first step to running your own site.
Etsy Pattern mirrors your Etsy listings, but on what’s effectively your own website. You can manage your Etsy shop and your Pattern site from the same place. Your inventory syncs automatically and you can take payments and process and ship orders all within the familiar Etsy management.
There are of course disadvantages of a marketplace shop, content on your listings is duplicated which may not be great SEO and you’ll be paying a fee on every sale. Transaction fees are the same 3.5% as if you sold on Etsy and the cost of a Pattern shop is $15.00 USD/month.
The plus side of Etsy Pattern is that it’s easy. There are plenty of low cost Wix and 1&1 style website builders with which you can create a templated website fairly easily. The difference with Etsy Pattern is that your website will automatically be populated with the products you already have listed on Etsy and inventory will be synched between the marketplace and your website. Normally the most time consuming part of setting up a website on a basic website builder tool is creating each product one by one, an Etsy Pattern website does this for you
Why would you want a website?
The big advantage of your own website is that it makes is a lot easier to drive traffic to your products with a memorable URL. You can buy a URL which matches your business name which you can then share on social media, print on business cards and flyers and use in your email signature.
It’s hard to recommend an Etsy Pattern website as a long term solution for a business with aspirations to grow beyond Etsy as you’ll quickly find it limiting not to mention still paying transaction fees. However as a first step for Etsy sellers who don’t already have a website, it’s a simple way to get started and the inventory import and synch make it a bit of a no brainer.
If you already sell on Etsy, you can sign up and create your Pattern website by following this link to Etsy.
Etsy Pattern gives you a stylish easy to manage website automatically
