Moving from Etsy to Shopify

Have you ever thought about moving from Etsy to Shopify? When ceramic artist Molly Hatch came to us, she had begun the process of doing just that. Molly had set up a simple Shopify website for her growing creative business, but the basic Shopify template didn’t showcase her brand in the way she envisioned. Her work could already be found in stores like Anthropologie, and she needed a site that would appeal to retail customers as well as wholesale clients. She told us,

“I want the buyer to understand that while I have a large brand presence I am a tiny design studio with 2 employees and myself making things happen. It’s really a tiny little business! I think that understanding this will give people a sense of personal investment in me as a designer and artist, and I find that is important for me as a shopper and I would imagine it would be important to my customers as well.”

Earlier this year, Molly co-hosted a 6-week online course called Thrive: Branding for Creatives. In one session, she talked with co-host Desha Peacock about how she worked with Aeolidia to make the move from Etsy to Shopify, and how it’s paid off big time since then.

When you interviewed Aeolidia, she was talking about how it’s a holistic web design approach — copywriting, photography, illustration, brand direction… I’m like, that is so cool. Like, what an amazing service, right?

I knew that I needed to be able to start selling directly without Etsy being my only platform. I was trying to figure out how to do that, so I set up a Shopify site.

At the time, MollyHatch.com was a site where you could see my portfolio of past designs and collaborations, but you couldn’t buy anything. I had a link out to my Etsy shop, so it meant that you had to leave my website in order to shop from me. It was really starting to become a problem, and I wanted to have one home, where everyone could find my stuff and see my artwork and learn about licensing from me and all the above.

I had seen some other sites that Aeolidia had done, and actually they had done Rifle Paper Company’s first website, as well, when Aeolidia was really sort of in its infancy. And I had read some articles and I just had seen how they had made Shopify sites look like a website and not a Shopify site, because that’s how how my shop looked, it looked like my Shopify template, which is fine.

But I think that one of the things that helped me a lot was already having that Shopify site and sort of understanding how Shopify worked and having a lot of my content already there when they started to work on it for me.

The site is really an amazing reflection of the brand and they really understood that because of the interviews that they did with me, leading up to designing and developing my custom Shopify website, but it also did take like six months. It wasn’t like a quick process.

You mentioned in an interview that after working with Aeolidia, you saw a 400% increase in sales.

I’ve made the same amount of money in the last two months of sales, each month, as the entire year last year. The entire annual income off of my site before having Aeolidia design my site is the same amount of money I’m earning on a monthly basis in the last couple of months.

I can’t speak highly enough to the power of having a good website. It doesn’t have to be Aeolidia — that’s not the point here. The point is that I’m taking in the information that they’re giving me and applying it. And they have been incredibly helpful and they’re just they just happen to be really good at what they’re doing.

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View Molly Hatch’s website »

Thinking of Moving from Etsy to Shopify?

Is your small business at a tipping point? Whether you choose to leave Etsy for Shopify, or want to use both at the same time to grow your online sales, we can help! As Shopify Experts, we’ve helped hundreds of creative online shop owners transform their brands and businesses.

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Check out our free Etsy vs Shopify fee calculator to find out if switching to Shopify from Etsy would save you money. Then contact us to learn more about taking your brand to the next level!

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