How To Not Be Confused While Using Etsy

In this post, I will be discussing the initial struggles that I came up against while opening my Etsy shop, and then, later on, I have included a section about printing my products with Awesome Merch and Mixam Print. If either of these things is something that you'd like to know more about then this is the blog post for you! Feel free to skip to parts that interest you the most.

Starting up Etsy

As you may know, I've recently opened up an Etsy shop. I thought that I would make a post about the initial struggles that I've come up against in the hope that my experiences can help someone who is currently thinking about starting a shop there.

Please bear in mind that I had never used Etsy before this point and so, other than the research that I had done, I was going in blind.

Upon creating an Etsy account I had already made a mistake (which a lot of people won't make) and that was to assume that the account I had created was a store account. It wasn't. I had named my personal account Mort Draws like a silly billy and wondered where the store part was. You do in fact need to click on the 'Sell on Etsy' button and you'll then be taken into the process of creating a shop. Like I said, I don't think other people would make this mistake, but I'm putting it here just in case. This did mean, I then had to change my personal page to my actual name and my shop name to MortDraws.

My main confusion was with the auto-renewal option while you're setting up your listings, as the information on that screen was ambiguous to me.

I had read in my research that Etsy takes 16p + 9% per listing, which I understood as 16p to list your product for four months and then 9% of each sale. From the listing screen: "Each renewal lasts for four months or until the listing sells out." To me, this reaffirmed what I had thought initially wherein I paid 16p for the four months, or until I ran out of products. I was mistaken.

As I began selling items, I saw Etsy take 16p under 'auto-renewal sold' to refresh the listing every time someone bought something, it took me some time but I did eventually find the explanation: "If you list multiple quantities of the same item, the initial listing fee will be $0.20(16p), and the listing will be automatically renewed at $0.20 after each of the items sells." Or more clearly: "Auto-renewed listings automatically repost a listing if it’s purchased from your shop, saving you the time of manually reposting products." So, in conclusion, you pay 16p to list your products, and then an additional 16p each time you sell an item plus the 9% for tax, transaction and payment processing fees.

Now, I hadn't considered all this while pricing up my listings so make sure you do!

The next thing you should consider while setting up your listing is the weight of your product once packaged and ready to go, I didn't do this and it stung me good. If you're based in the UK, the Royal Mail has a helpful list on postage costs both within and outside of the UK, which I did look at but then guessed the weight of my products? Yeah, don't do that, please check! I did have the common sense to measure the envelopes at least and was expecting a £1.15 charge for a large letter but I didn't weigh it beforehand so my charge was actually £1.64. If I'd actually checked I would have been able to incorporate that into my initial costings while pricing up.

Other than these couple of hiccups (which are simply my misjudgement on interpreting information) my overall experience on Etsy has been rather positive! Once I'd found their help guide, it was quite useful, and they had great suggestions on how to take pictures of your products while setting up your listings. It's largely an easy to use platform and it was smooth to set up and start selling.

Getting Products Printed

Since it ties in nicely to starting up a shop, I'll mention it now. For the two products I have, I used a different printing company for each. For my prints and business cards, I used Awesome Merch because they offer double-sided business cards and were pretty well known on my university course, and for my comic, I used Mixam Print as they specialise in book printing, and I had heard very positive things about them from some of my peers. My experience with both was excellent and I'll walk you through how it went.

Awesome Merch

At the time of my order, Awesome Merch had a deal on for 100 business cards for £5, and I thought I would test out the overall quality by ordering prints as well to make the order more worthwhile. I downloaded their template PSD files and got my files ready before I submitted my order, I did need photoshop in order to do this. They allow you to specify a split in designs for a little extra, so I used that to order four different print designs, however, because my business cards were part of a deal I had to order two quantities of them in order to receive two different designs.

Now I needed to upload the images. Since I'd ordered two quantities of business cards I assumed that there would be two slots to upload to (foolishly I didn't look at the whole page first). I uploaded my first design and scrolled to see only the slot for my prints remaining! I uploaded all four of the prints' files without trouble and went back to the card slot to upload the other files but there wasn't an option to upload more. I thought 'no worries, I'll delete the files and reupload all of them'. Well, they deleted fine, however when I reuploaded them the website buffered... And buffered... And buffered. In a state of panic, fearing that I'd messed up my first order, I ran to customer services and explained what had happened and they took care of it right away! I gave the correct files through email and everything worked out fine. My one gripe would be that processing and postage took a while, however with the pandemic still effecting peoples' work I can forgive that. Overall, a very positive experience with Awesome Merch, they handled my fumble with grace and I cannot fault them at all. Their product quality is superb, and they even offer a sample pack for £2. I'll be eager to try out their other products in the future.

Mixam Print

Mixam print turned out to be cheaper to print books with than a lot of other companies! They do offer template files but I didn't use them because the size I required was a custom one. They provide a free sample pack, and an option to have a test print for £4.50 (as long as your project fits into the guidelines; mine didn't). Because I knew what to expect this time around, I had no issue with uploading my files. Processing and postage were exceptionally fast, and I was really pleased with the quality of paper and colour vibrancy. I only ordered a small quantity as a test, and I was pleased to find out that they had printed me a few extra! Due to their specialisation in printing books, excellent print quality, and quick turn around I will be returning to Mixam in the future for sure.

So that's my experience so far! I don't have many listings as of yet, but I have a few things I'm working on which I'll be so excited to print. I have also noticed that there's an option to sell digital copies of work on Etsy which is definitely something that I'd like to try out soon! I hope this has been a helpful post if you're looking to sell on Etsy or get some products printed, and I hope I have explained the costs a little better than the sites that I used for research.

Etsy's guide on how to open a shop is here.

A link to Mixam's site is here, and Awesome Merch is here.

My Etsy shop is here!

If you have any questions about what I've written here feel free to DM or email me.

Thanks for reading!

Mort

Finishing Uni aaand Lockdown

This blog post is possibly a few weeks late, however I'll post it anyway.

As the final weeks before hand-in came rushing towards me, I was very much looking forward to submitting everything and beginning my journey as a professional illustrator and comic artist. I still am. For the first time in my life, my path is mine to choose, with no hoops to jump through, and no-one grading my work.

However, society has come to somewhat of a halt, of late, and the plans that I had laid out for myself cannot continue in the way that I had intended.

I moved back home just before Easter with the naive hope that I would be able to return for, at least, the last two weeks of uni and to still exhibit our final show.

Easter came and went.

And then so did a couple more weeks... aaand a couple more.

It took a while but I realised that I wasn't going to be able to live my last few weeks in Wrexham the way I had wanted. Having BBQs in the summer sun, surrounded by my friends, feeling accomplished that we'd all finished uni together.

But of course, none of that happened, and neither were my plans for after uni - at least in the way that I had wanted.

I was looking forward to travelling down to the library, or a cafe every day to get some work done in a friendly place and possibly make some friends - definitely make some friends. But of course, everyone is deprived of that luxury currently, and may be for quite some time. With all my distractions around me, my routine of the past year quickly fell away. I was told to stop running by the physio, limited space made pilates difficult, having no proper routine meant that I neglected my mindfulness, and my increased time on games made me question the value of my hobbies, it felt like I was losing myself completely.

And then I realised that the circumstances were absolutely extraordinary and there wasn't much point in making myself feel worse than I already did. If I couldn't go for a run then a walk was just as good, the limited space was just an excuse, and I could, in fact, do pilates. Perhaps moving the time in which I do mindfulness would be a way around my loss of morning routine. And although I cannot search my local area for potential face to face friends, I have many current, albeit far away, great friends that I can reach through social media.

So I guess, what I'm trying to say is, that even though times have changed and the current world events have uprooted so many things, it's time to take advantage of the greatest parts of being human: Adaptability and empathy.

We have the ability to contact almost anyone at any time, and now is a very important time to utilise this - it's certainly been crucial to my mental health and probably to a lot of other peoples' too. And empathy is always something that I've admired about humans, our ability to put ourselves in other peoples' shoes and feel what they feel - or at least imagine - the power to be kind even in the face of adversity and change is truly awesome.

I hope that if you're reading this, that you're doing okay.

See you next time,

Mort

Workshop - Drawing Research

The official term is 'Graphic Facilitator'. Being a graphic facilitator sounds super fancy and intimidating, however, it's just drawing while people talk at you.

And I say 'just' like having people watch you draw isn't terrifying...

Anyway, about a week ago S, asked our class if anyone would be interested in having a go at being a graphic facilitator for some researchers who were going to come in and discuss with us what they're doing. Now, my initial reaction to anything that's sprung on me is 'nO!', but instead of saying that I said I'd think about it. I spent some time looking at the examples that S had provided and read a little about what would be expected - we would basically be turning their spoken word into images and text in the form of a mindmap - and decided that it sounded like a nice opportunity to do something a little different.

The actual day did get off to a rocky start though.

Everyone has been super busy lately, all across the uni, and so us illustrators arrived in good time at 12:30 - but the researchers didn't arrive until 1:30, a little sigh-inducing but it was okay. The wait didn't matter so much since it gave us a little time to get to know the other staff involved in putting together the workshop, and learn a little more about what was going to happen. Once everyone had arrived, we sat in a circle and introduced ourselves. The researchers were all in different stages of researching their PhD thesis', and the subject varied massively between them.

We then escaped from the massively hot and humid conference room up to our illustration studio and discussed who should be paired with whom.

I was paired with a man who was researching the building of sustainable housing and off-grid estates, right up my street! We got to talking about his work and the aim of reducing our CO2 output to zero by 2050, we agreed that it was possible, but not necessarily probable. He helped by jotting down how he thought some elements of the mind map might look - since this was for his research I wanted it to make sense to him more than anyone else. And as we continued talking, the mind map grew.

Now honestly, I was quite nervous of having to draw in front of someone, but it was very fun and easy once I put pen to paper and it didn't take long once we got going.

I hope that he will find the mind map helpful - even if it just makes him grin when he looks up from his desk as he continues his research journey. It would definitely be fun to do something like this again.

My partner mentioned that he'd also be giving a talk in one of the uni's lecture halls about climate change next week. I think this would give me a good opportunity to take first-hand notes on a subject I'm aiming to apply to future artworks, and a subject I'm passionate about.

I hope my final year continues to throw interesting opportunities my way as this one has been super fun,

see you next time,

Mort.