Change in the air

I'm not afraid of change. Really, I'm not. Much.

OK, I like the newness, I like the novelty, but - I hate making the decision and doing the work to change.

But when a site I'm selling decides to make changes to its Privacy Policy that can result in spam for people on my own private email list unless I opt out, I make the change.

Etsy, I'm sorry. I've tried. I'm not selling much, and a lot of that is my own doing, but when you do things like automatically assume that your sellers want their email lists linked to their shops while at the same time prohibiting your own sellers from any sort of contact that might be construed as spam, well, it makes sellers want to run screaming. I can't imagine what it would do to new buyers, but I personally shy away from sites where I have to expose my contacts like that.

I like Facebook, I like hanging with my peeps in a virtual setting, I like communicating with people I know from wildly divergent places and in very different ways. I even kind of enjoy pushing my tie-dye there once in a while, and I like that it sometimes brings me a new look or a sale I might otherwise not have gotten. But to be honest, most of that happens off-Etsy anyway. Why would I want my customers' emails exposed to a whole other venue when I'm starting to do more off-Etsy business anyway?

So Etsy would like to be more of a social networking site. If I wanted to be on another social networking site that'd be fine - but I don't really. I signed up for Etsy to sell tie-dye, and that's it. As it is I'm lost in the number of tie-dye vendors already there, but I don't see how dragging my email contacts into Etsy is going to increase my sales. Maybe I'll get lucky and someone else's email list will send someone to my shop to buy something - which won't help the person they were harvested from.

In the last year I've sent out a lot of business cards with my Etsy shop address on them. A LOT. So it makes sense that I'll probably keep a token presence there for a while until the new Zibbet shop takes off. ANd now that I'm out of the old cards, my next batch will have both shop addresses on them.... with the Zibbet one first. Free to list up to 50 items - I usually have more like 30-35 - and no listing fees. Off to a rousing start already. So far I'm liking what I see over there - come and have a look-see, see what you think!