So I decided to try my hand at selling some of my handmade journals on Etsy. Suffice to say that so far the experiment has not yielded great results 😀 Here’s my store, in case you want to take a peak.

Initially, I thought that I should create my own standalone store. After doing some research across platforms such as Shopify, Wix, WordPress and Gumroad, I settled on Gumroad. While Shopify is definitely the more powerful and established platform, Gumroad is cheaper to get started and I wanted to see if this approach led anywhere. I purchased the domain zenscribbles.com (on GoDaddy), and opened up my storefront (zenscribbles.com).

But you see, how do you drive traffic to a brand new domain? Any why should a customer trust buying something from some arbitrary website? I realized that unless I had a plan for building up the brand “Zen Scribbles” first, and could find a way to drive traffic to the website, this was not a great strategy (atleast not for me).

And so I asked myself – where do people go to purchase unique handmade goods? Of course, it’s Etsy.

So I created a store on Etsy.

It’s been about 4 months now, and I’ve sold two journals. Yeah….two. I guess that’s better than nothing but it’s not the runaway success I was hoping for 🙂 I’ve tried experimenting with the price point – high and low. I’ve tried offering discounts. And of course, I’ve run ads on Etsy. I’m beginning to see that it’s close to impossible to rank high on Etsy, for a new storefront. Unless you run a marketing campaign that drives a lot of eyeballs to your store, get a lot of good reviews from the get go, it’s a hard road ahead. And if you do do all of this – that begs the question, what’s the point of Etsy?

I’m confident that my product is good. So….I’m now wondering what other avenues I should explore to sell my journals. The search continues.