Etsy vs. Creative Market – a comparison for shop owners – Part 2

Hi again!  First things first, I want to send a huge THANK YOU to so many of you I have heard from!  I’m so happy to hear, not only that my posts are being read ;-), but mainly that it’s a helpful topic for some of you. I’m a helper by nature, so seeing that I’m helping someone really goes a long way for me!

Anyway, I’m sure you are anxious to hear more about what I’ve learned so here we go… The first post dealt most with the application process on Creative Market. In this post, we will talk more about establishing your shop and starting to list products.

Once approved on Creative Market, can I start listing my products?

Honestly yes. I say yes because it was very soon after. I did have to go through one more validation check on my email before I could start listing items. As long as you can get to your email right away though, it’s pretty immediate. Once I verified, I just added a shop name, logo, banner, and short bio per the suggested parameters and that was it.

The nice thing here was it was so quick and simple compared to Etsy. In the last post, I touched on how much needs to be customized in Etsy. There is a banner, the logo, the bio, the shop bio, the owner photo, payment info, shipping info, return and refund policies, terms of use, shop announcement etc! Wow, I get tired just thinking of it all. While not all of these are required, there are enough articles suggesting the lack of having these sections filled out can hurt your shop’s SEO. I have no way of proving if this is the case or not, but for me, it’s not worth dropping in rank just because I don’t want to fill everything out.

What’s the listing process like?

This is such a huge difference! While I like that I can be very detailed on etsy, add my own terms, shop policies etc. So far, Creative Market has been a lot smoother. I can probably add about 5 listings in the time it takes me to add a single listing to etsy. I guess part of this is just how broad of a market Etsy’s become, which is awesome actually. Creative Market, being digital only, has much narrower parameters. I counted 18 fields I need to fill in on Etsy. 10 of these fields mandatory, you don’t want to skip at least 2 of the optional fields because that’s how people find you! On Creative Market I am counting 8 fields. You could probably get away with 7 if you don’t need to add extra parameters.

I started including some listing process differences here, but on further thought, the breakdown actually deserves it’s own post.  That’s what we will analyze next time… in 2016!

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!

P.S I’d love to hear your feedback or questions you would like addressed. You can simply leave a comment, or if that’s not your thing, just shoot me an email. I’d love to hear from you!