Moving Day! Look for my Shop on Etsy!

Hi everyone! I’m moving my online shop to Etsy. Please see the link!

PaperButterflyForge – Etsy

TLDR: Websites are Expensive. Etsy is Less Expensive.

The time and effort to maintain my online shop on this website is quickly overcoming the benefits. Whilst I am not the biggest Etsy fan, they do provide the least expensive and reliable alternative for ecommerce for crafters.

I’ve had this website for just over 10 years now. Which just seems incredible that I’ve been making recycled book journals for over ten years. I’ve made just over 4,800 book journals. Of course, because I like upcycling books that not everyone is fan of, they haven’t all sold. 🙂

I’ve sold them at local craft fairs, the handmade market at Pike Place Market, and of course on this very website. It’s been a long journey. 🙂 (I don’t sell at the Pike Place Market, but you should go there and take a gander at the absolutely beautiful handmade good there!)

What makes a website (woo commerce) too expensive?

• Server space. I have to host my website on a hosting service. The thing is that you need a quick server to serve up information to customers. No one wants a website to be slow, especially after you have loaded your credit card information into it. A couple of things feed into a website being slow.
• Is your server fast? It’s true that a dedicated server is available. But at what price? Woo Commerce hosting servers are about $50 per month. Or $600 per year. That is for a multi year commitment, of course. Do you need a fast server like that? It certainly helps. My woo commerce was at a slower hosting plan that wasn’t as robust. In my loading stats, it was definitely a slow website.
• Is the software fast? WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress. Therefore, it has been stretching the definition of what a blog is for a while now. They have been fixing some of the problems, but it’s definitely a structural issue as well.
• What is the end result? My website was getting ‘disconnected from the database errors’ on a regular basis for about six months. The only thing that I could figure out was the slow server wasn’t connecting with the slow software. I can’t blame anyone for giving up on my shop while this was going on. I’m not a technical person and people want to charge money for fixing stuff like this. 🙂 I had to find a few blogs. LOL

But, hasn’t this been true all along? Having my shop for 10 years, there has been a noticeable difference in shop traffic and website quality. In the past few years/six months it’s been slow, accumulating errors, etc. I don’t have any proof that my server activity has been throttled to pay for the more expensive alternatives. I wouldn’t want to suggest that is true, but the enshittification of the internet is a thing. Cory Doctorow (https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?si=sOCWGksthOoBkSh3 )

Time spent researching and potentially spending a fair amount of money, meant that I had to redo the budget for everything and determine what was the best course of action. Do I plunk down more money or time? Or do I use someone else’s platform?

I chose to go with Etsy instead of trying to maintain my online store. I spent some time evaluating Shopify and Go Imagine, and others. But I had to go with Etsy. Even though I’m not a big fan of all the people violating the Terms of Service there.