My sister has been thinking about opening a second Etsy shop for fabric and keeping her shop to just planner supplies. I told her: don’t do it! She was all like ‘why?’ so I explained to her the pros and cons and what happened after I opened a second Etsy shop for graphic design resources, and why it was a really bad idea. If you’ve been thinking about opening a second Etsy shop, make sure you read this post before proceeding!

Pros of opening a second Etsy shop

• If you sell products that have different terms of use it’s a good way to keep them separate. For example, all printables in my main shop, AllAboutTheHouse are for personal use only. The graphic design resources in my second Etsy shop, PaperCravings can be used for commercial use. By keeping them separate it avoids confusion and there’s no, ‘oh I thought this was ok for commercial use’ when people haven’t read terms of use properly or are hoping to use that as an excuse to not abide by your terms of use

• If you sell completely different products it’s a good idea to separate those products into 2 Etsy shops. Someone looking for hand-knitted winter clothing may not be interested in wood furniture. If your products are in completely different niches, you’ll turn people off and they won’t want to stick around if your shop is a jumbled mess of this and that. People want a one stop shop – this is Etsy not eBay!

• Having 2 Etsy shops means you can use one of them to market the other. So people interested in the products sold one shop may also be interested in the products sold in your other shop. They may not have discovered one of your shop unless they’d found your other shop

• If you sell digital products and physical products I highly recommend separating them. That’s why printed & cut stickers are sold via my sister’s Etsy shop, Carefully Crafted by Jo. You’ll avoid a dozen questions from customers asking why they haven’t received their item in the mail when they purchased a digital product (I still get emails from customers asking when the item was shipped even though my shop is 100% digital products). Adding ‘printable’ or ‘digital download’ to every image is also helpful as most people don’t read the listing description

Related Post: How to make business cards for free (step by step tutorial)

Cons of opening a second Etsy shop

• You now have twice the work – you create a lot more administration and behind the scenes work that people won’t see and which you won’t get paid for. You now have to promote 2 shops, foster repeat business for 2 shops, pay 2 Etsy bills etc.

• You have to log in and out of Etsy all the time to answer convo’s for both shops. To avoid wasting time having to log in and oout too often, I use Chrome for one Etsy shop and am logged into my other Etsy shops using Firefox

• If both shops get ‘big’, you need to keep them as separate businesses – so you’ll have to file taxes for both shops, maintain spreadsheets for both shops etc. You can still use the same PayPal account for both of your Etsy shops

• You’ll need to disclose (I do this in my about page) that you sell on Etsy under another shop/username

• If you use apps such as Etsy on sale (which I use to easily run a store-wide sale for Black Friday, I did a full tutorial (including video) in this post) you’ll either need to pay for 2 accounts, or pay for extra credits because you have 2 shops – that counts as having 2 sales so you’ll need to pay twice. You’ll also need to set it up twice for both shops

• If you sell physical inventory – you’ll have to maintain 2 inventory systems (unless you sell completely different products in which case you could probably get away with still using 1 inventory for everything, but it will be a hassle come tax time)

• You can’t list the same product in both shops under Etsy’s policies

• Have to pay for second det of business cards (or you could use the same business card and have both of your shop links)

• Do you have enough products to open a second Etsy shop? If you only have 50 products in your shop, you probably shouldn’t split it into 2 different shops. Unless you have a couple of hundred products, splitting will mean both of your shops have very few items. Shops with few items typically don’t show up often in search results

• Running one Etsy shop takes a lot of work. Running 2 Etsy shops takes even more work. If you decide to open a second one – one of your 2 Etsy shops will suffer

“When you say yes to something you have to say no to something else”

Related Post: Simple spreadsheets to keep track of business income and expenses for tax time

Related post: My simple and easy method for tracking product inventory using Excel spreadsheets

Why I regret opening a second Etsy shop

It’s really hard to drive traffic to your Etsy shop. With so many Etsy sellers nowadays there is a LOT of competition. it’s hard enough getting people to your shop, let alone keeping them there. To try and be like, so if you click this product, then this link in that listing (assuming people even read the listing), then that will take you to my second Etsy shop. People need to have it right in front of their face. If you’re worried about having too many products in your shop and making it hard to navigate – don’t be. That’s why people love places like Walmart – that are a one stop shop. People do use the search bar and you can use the trick I shared above for similar products/colors/styles.

If you take a look at the top sellers on CraftCount, we can see that most of the top sellers have thousands of product listings – especially those that don’t have a blog, or aren’t active on social media. Listings are a great way to market your shop – the more you have (and the more you have correctly SEO optomised), the easier it is for people to find your shop, and the more likely they are to stick around for longer or favorite your shop so they can finish browsing through all of your listings. For help with SEO, check out my tutorials on how to use Marmalead and the Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool.

The onerous back end tasks just isn’t worth it. To be honest, I haven’t touched my second Etsy shop, PaperCravings in about 2 years – it just sits there earning passive income. Before you get excited about the prospect of passive income, it’s only about $100/month and it takes a LOT of time upfront to create the products in my shop. I previously wrote about the process behind making a printable planner. Because I haven’t released anything new the shop is kind of ‘dead’ – Etsy favours active shops – so those that list new items (selling and auto-renewing an item counts as a ‘new’ item) and sites that have a lot of feedback and are updated regularly.

Related Post: 5 Reasons why I hide my Etsy shop sales history 

If you do decide to open a second Etsy shop, here are some of my best tips

• Utilize the maximum number of shop sections

• Include multiple words/categories in your shop sections – make sure you place the most popular items first (better for SEO)

• If you sell collections, use an SKU code to make it easy for customers to shop other items in the collection. Another option is to ‘save’ a search.

For example, I offer each of my planner printables in 6-7 colors, with a separate listing for each color (having more listings in your shop means it’s easier for people to find your shop). To make it easier for people to choose the color of the kit they’re interested in, I do a search for that kit (for the budget planner this is ‘budget binder printable household binder chevron debt savings‘ as these are the first words of those listings) then use bitly (it’s free) to shorten and neaten the link, then place this in the listing description for every color. That way it’s easy for people to choose what color they’d like.

I keep the first words of the listing the same then switch out the last ones so that not every listing has the exact same title

So this is what people see in each of the items listing descriptions

And this is what the link in that listing will take them to. So now they can click on the listing for the color they’re like and purchase, rather that sifting through my shop. If you have a lot of products in similar colors and styles I highly recommend you update your listings to include links to other listings! If you want to batch update your Etsy listings in a matter of minutes, I shared a tutorial (video & written instructions) on how to do this using a free tool.  

• If you have your own website, include links to that. I use BigCommerce – it’s much easier to organize into a lot more shop categories than it is on Etsy.

• Use a very similar logo to your main shop. if you take a look at my shops, you’ll notice that I use the same logo for each and just switched out the wording. For my Etsy shop banner (I shared a tutorial on how to make a banner in this post, and how to make a logo/profile picture for your Etsy shop in this post.

Her’s what the home page of my main shop, AllAboutTheHouse looks like

Related Post: 13 Lessons learned after 13,000 sales

And what the home page of my second Etsy shop, PaperCravings looks like

Both feature a black background with white font (in the same font style) and with rainbow elements – and the logo uses the same rainbow stripe.

If you want to learn how I made my an Etsy shop banners, I shared a step by step tutorial (including video). I also did a tutorial on how to make a logo/profile picture for your Etsy shop.

The reason I kept my shops separate was because one is filled with personal use products and the second is commercial use (so more of a ‘supplies’ shop). Even if you have 5,000 listings I still don’t recommend that you split your shop into 2. People shopping for my personal use products may also be interested in my commercial use products. To apply this to your own shop, you want to be both selling to consumer (i.e. people that want the end products you make) and makers (i.e. people that want to know how to do what you do), this way you become a one stop shop!

If you want more help growing your Etsy shop, I’ve created a bundle with a personalised Etsy shop critique and comprehensive 219 page ebook. The shop critique will pinpoint aspects of your shop that need improving, and the ebook goes deeper into exactly HOW to implement those changes. It it literally a step by step approach – I don’t just tell you what to do = I show you how and why. I’ve made 6 figures on Etsy using the strategies in my ebook – if you want to grow your Etsy shop, here’s the link to where you can purchase the bundle.

Related Posts:

• 5 Reasons why I hide my Etsy shop sales history 
• How to backup files on your computer or laptop (best and cheapest cloud storage software) 
• How to effectively use and make an Etsy shop banner (step by step video tutorial) 
• How to make a logo for your Etsy shop (with step by step video tutorial) 
• How to make a product catalogue/line sheet for your business (selling to wholesalers or retailers) 

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