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| You can now shop our natural and hair-friendly wares at www.nightbloominggarden.com , http://nightblooming.patternbyetsy.com , or www.etsy.com/shop/NightBlooming |
You now have another great way to shop and purchase from NightBlooming! Today Etsy rolled out something called Pattern by Etsy.
What this allowed me to do was accomplish one of the Big Store Goals, which was a site that was not technically on etsy.com. So without further ado:
So, why? Aren't you doing just fine with us on Etsy?
While all my current customers are obviously very Etsy-savvy, sometimes people don't get over that initial hurdle. "I don't have an Etsy account," is enough to turn people off because, seriously, if you don't already have an account someplace do you really want to register for one? This lets people skirt that hurdle, but still enjoy NightBlooming products.
Why this and not a homebrew site?
The main hangup with building my own site was not the building, but the amount of double-work involved. Etsy has made a lot of great improvements with stats, order tracking, and shipping labels. Having my own site would mean returning to doing all those things in a totally different way, and also maintaining inventory in a way that would track it across two sites. (Meaning if I had 25 packets of Genasi on hand, I'd have to track that and reduce it manually depending on how much sold on which site.)For shipping labels, I'd have to print the orders made on Etsy one way, the ones on a stand-alone site another. If someone placed an order on one site, it wouldn't show in their order history on the other. With this method all my inventory, customer order tracking, shipping labels, and things that make my life much, much easier stays in one database.
There are some things that Pattern is lacking. It it still isn't easy for me to do customer rewards (I keep envisioning a buy 10 get 1 free on packets of herbal hair colors, for example), I don't get to control every aspect of my own branding, and I can't house my blog on the same site. But we'll figure out customer rewards yet, and the rest of the trade-offs are manageable.
Give it a whirl! I'm eager to know about your experience.
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