artfire? etsy? artfire? etsy? something else????

Online selling. ugh.

Short story long, I've been trying to sell my jewelry online for over 5 years.

Now don't get me wrong, I totally understand with my time constraints It's never going to be a steady income stream.

I work full time, I'm a wife, a mom, a so-so house keeper and I don't get enough sleep as it is. Somewhere in all of those roles, I have to find time to make art. Finding time to sell it too is HARD.

I do 20-25 shows each year, and time is a serious issue.

I tried for 2 years to sell jewelry directly on my website -- I had a sales cart set up and everything.

I never sold anything that way. No traffic to speak of... and it's very hard to set up and maintain a shopping cart.

So I scaled down my website, deleted the cart and just linked to Etsy. I sold something maybe every 3-4 months on average.

Not quite 2 years ago I learned about Artfire, and last year went "pro" on it, and moved most of my jewelry to it.

I haven't hardly sold anything since that move.

I opened a new Etsy shop in July to sell destash items (mkpdestash) and I'm selling something almost every week.

So it seems like a good time to try Etsy again for jewelry on my old Etsy site MKPjewelry . Now I know selling jewelry vs. selling supplies is a much different thing, but Etsy seems to have much more traffic than Artfire overall, and they have made changes the last year that I really like. (And Artfire has made changes I don't!)

But I want to do it right.. I'm tired of the categories of "bracelets" and "necklaces". I've been trying to focus my jewelry over the last year more into "lines" so I'm working on getting all of the artfire listings transferred to Etsy and categorized by line instead of function.

I'll be talking more about this in the coming weeks ( months? remember my time issues!) for for example, the necklace pictured today would fall under my "Romantic Fancies" line. This line is where I use brass stampings, vintage jewelry bits, crystals, stones, found items, glass etc. to make a wide range of jewelry with a vintage flair but modern aesthetics. The piece above has modern brass stampings made with vintage tooling, vintage & modern glass leaves and flowers, crystals and chain.

I'll keep both sites up for a couple of months, and see how it goes. Then one or the other is going to get closed down... I just don't have the time or energy to market 2 different jewelry sites to sell on.

So take a look at both of them... Artfire , and then the Etsy.

Let me know which one you like. Or let me know if there is something in peculiar you like about the sites.. I want to know.